On Tuesday night, during four minutes of applause, the public expressed its solid recognition of the show with which the Liceu began its dance season, which this year appears as a tributary of the programming, barely concentrated between February and July. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui made the people of Barcelona enjoy two pieces from his long career that are the two sides of the Belgian choreographer: Faun and Noetic, the instinctive and the rational, the animal and the cultural… by the fabulous Grand Théâtre Ballet of Geneva which he now directs.
It was 2009 when Cherkaoui drank from the spirit of Nizhinsky – he sucked it in – to celebrate the centenary of those Russian ballets by Diaghilev in which the mythical dancer shone with his own light, especially in the recreation of the myth of the faun and the nymph to the music of Debussy. Cherkaoui created his own duo playing with the animalistic physicality that is natural to him, twisting a body that seemed like plasticine, breaking aesthetic canons with an originality that never falls into the vulgar, nor is it obvious or cliché. If Diaghilev’s artists started from an attitude, he starts one hundred percent from the form, a living, fluid, natural, unstoppable form.
On the contrary, Noetic, which the Liceu has chosen for this notable date with dance, is a crossing – rather a mélange – of science and dance that, like in Sutra (2008) or Babel (2010), arises from a collaboration with a specialist, in this case the British sculptor Antony Gormley, who created the flexible rods that the dancers bend in circles, abandoning them to their inertia or creating shapes that evoke everything from a cathedral nave to the globe.
With music by Szymon Brzoska that was recorded – with the exception of a Japanese folk musician who played percussion, shinobue (flute) and the kokyu (zither), and a soprano who served as the timeless sibyl – the piece starts from mathematics and gives meaning to the spirals, those movements of fluid turns that have been a constant in Cherkaoui’s work. Although here the patterns are soft and curved and bring real architectural beauty to the process.
From the instinctive Faun to the abstract and intellectual Noetic, which, as a cultural nod, launched audio descriptions and scientific references on theorems, vectors, repeating patterns and other analytical geometries that, in essence, were an SOS. poetic. You don’t have to understand them, mathematics, we already live in them!
The Liceu has kept the dance faithful in dry dock for months to now, suddenly, enter a manna: Cherkaoui and the Ballet of the Grand Théâtre of Geneva; Alexander Ekman with the Dormund Ballet (April), and Sasha Waltz
The Belgian choreographer and stage director is no longer that young man who in 2011 debuted on the stage of the velvety Barcelona coliseum with María Pagés and her dreamlike Dunas. In that miraculous duet, the ductile dancer blended in with the flow of the desert sands. Now, having undergone surgery for an injury, the restless creator is happily living his time behind the scenes, at the head of the Geneva company that was already born contemporary in the mid-20th century. The Liceu, which is late in terms of dance, opens its doors to what is possibly the creator with the most personality on the modern dance scene.