“My name actually means Monsieur Arab from the East”, the Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui explains, as he tells me about his multi-faceted identity. He has just finished a rehearsal session for his forthcoming dance work, Imperial Ball, at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, where he has been Director of Ballet since 2022.
“When I was young, having this multiple identity allowed me to perceive the world by being a bit out of it… I had to explain that my name was Arabic but I didn’t look Arab. I had this friction between what I was and what I looked like. Plus, I’m a queer man and there was a feminine aspect in me, which didn’t fit with the world. Inside me there was this great ambiguity. I live on the border of things.”
Becoming a choreographer has allowed Cherkaoui to make sense of a meaningless world. “There is something reassuring in being able to see and live through the same thing infinitely. This is why I love so much working with old projects. They allow me to relive the past in the present, like a living memory. For me dance is a living memory.”
For Cherkaoui, choreography often intertwines past, present and future. Two of his recent projects are homages to his Flemish mother and Moroccan father. “[My father] went to Belgium for a better life, but nobody took him seriously, so he worked with his hands. This is why he was against me doing arts and asked me to do something ‘serious’; but art is the most serious thing I can do.”
It is his mother whom he considers his saviour. “I remember her telling me there are people who love you; and I want you to exist. It was a great gift for me to see my value beyond myself.”
Cherkaoui is not afraid of his scars, or revealing them. His new production, Imperial Ball, to music by Johann Strauss II, goes beyond the world of aristocratic pretence to reveal open wounds. “Underneath there is a lot of insecurity. Pretension becomes an armour that one puts around things that are very sensitive, and wounds that have not healed. But under this veneer you are really hurt. And that is the real you. And to show these puts you in a really vulnerable place. But it also puts you in a place of honesty and transparency”.
The project also explores the distinction between Ball and Ballet. “One comes to watch ballet passively. But the ball is a social dance. One comes to take part and should know the codes. It forces everyone to be in the same latitude: everyone does the same step, looks in the same direction. It’s a bit like in war… There is something fascist-like, in both the ball and in war, with the mise-en-place of soldiers: everyone in the same position and having the same rhythm. It’s the rhythm that is designed to conquer. It’s something submerging that takes you over.”
For this project Cherkaoui is working with Tim Yip, a costume designer known among other things for his work on the martial arts film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. “He deconstructs the ancient to make something new. He is a real modern artist.” The invitation for the project came from Vienna to mark the bicentenary of Strauss Jr., the ‘Waltz King’. “It’s not music I usually work with – the music is of course well-known. I am curious to know how people react to the images that I put together with this music, given that they might already have their own images”.
Imperial Ball isn’t the only thing Cherkaoui is doing either. “The logistics are a bit special”, he says, as he reels off his “conjunction” of multiple projects: Idomeneo for the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, his own project, Ihsane, which has been touring in Canada in October, and Geneva revivals of Pelléas et Mélisande (2018) and Boléro (2013), the latter being paired with Imperial Ball.
He admits it’s not always his choice to have so many parallel ventures. “I have to accept that my projects have a life of their own, and I need to simply navigate them like a conductor and be in different places at the same time.” For this he’s grateful to technology for allowing him to be active in several time zones simultaneously. Still, he occasionally has to delegate, as with the forthcoming American tour of his celebrated 2008 collaboration with Antony Gormley and the Shaolin Monks, Sutra.
Among other collaborators extraordinaires, Pelléas and Boléro saw him work with the Belgo-French director/choreographer, Damien Jalet – who also choreographed the Oscar-nominated film, Emilia Perez – and the renowned Serbian conceptual and performance artist, Marina Abramović.
I ask Cherkaoui how he chooses his projects. “I think it’s usually by the love of the subject. Or something in the subject with which I connect. In Pelléas, it was the mystery of Mélisande, and the incredible floating music of Debussy.” He was attracted by Mélisande’s resilience and lucidity. “It made me think of artists such as Marina [Abramović] who have a similar clarity. And often this clarity might appear as madness. But in fact, they see more clearly than others. As a queer man, I am attracted by this form of profound lucidity on the threshold of madness.”
The new show starts with Boléro, as “a galactic kind of reality”. (“With Marina and Damien we spoke about the idea of a galaxy: space and light… We wanted all the dancers to shine equally, with no centre.”) Then comes the earth with Imperial Ball and its dreamlike narrative. “Here I am focused on theatricality and musicality, and maybe a form of comment on the way we treat each other. So there will be something recognizable of an elite, and a decadence that eventually ends up falling apart, and all of that could be seen as a storytelling. But for me it’s very intuitive. It’s got more of a dreamscape kind of reality. Let’s say Boléro is about space and time, and Imperial Ball about earth.”
Cherkaoui has managed to find vulnerability and even danger in Strauss’ music. “Strauss had a genuine desire to bring people together, but at the same time, he lived in a world where the Empire in whose service he was had become extremely problematic. He was avoiding all the real issues that were present just outside of these places where everything seemed to be fine and great. I think a lot about that: as an artist, how I am not in real life as much as I was before. How should I find connection with real life?”
Yet he finds himself at odds with Strauss. “I feel his art shows his fears. He makes things in major modes as if he doesn't want to die, as if he’s afraid of death. That’s the exact opposite of me. I think I am constantly dying in my work. My work is always a way of saying goodbye. Like I am already dead and so every day is a bonus for me”.
Death is also at the heart of Boléro. “With Damien and Marina we agreed to go to the end, like an orgasm, bringing us to death. We start with black veils, almost like spiritual beings who are orbiting, and slowly they are unravelling. They are slowly showing more and more transparency.” They reveal flesh-coloured, skeleton-like costumes, as if displaying their inner beings. “They show their humanity. The idea is to go from a spiritual being to a very physical being.” This translates as physicality between dancers. While at the beginning they simply orbit around each other, they are gradually attracted towards one another, and by the end they are hooked together in embrace; but eventually they have to let go of one another. “The ending is very abrupt.”
Cherkaoui’s answers are as free-floating as his choreography, pirouetting swiftly and at times restlessly from an idea to another. But at the heart of it all there is the idea of reaching out and healing through dance. “I love all styles of dance. But maybe the one I most prefer is tango. It’s intimate but at the same time like a consolation. And maybe that’s what I also look for in dance: to be consoled. Consoled, because life is hard; it’s short, and full of moments of instability. I look to find stability through dance.”
As we talk, the light at the basement of the Theatre building has faded away. He seems at one with the darkness around him. Another appointment awaits, and then another. So we wrap up as he walks out of the building and through the streets; everything looks dreamlike and hazy with the hues of evening light. He tells me about his plans to work with contemporary composers, such as Dmitris Skallys, with his idea of a project that deals with democracy, and what he admires in his collaborators such as Abramović and Gormley. “They offer the world a very particular way of being conscious about our individuality, and the idea of being a human. And these are people that really inspire me to try as a choreographer, to also do things from that angle, you know, to stay very true to myself.”
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s choreography is featured in Pelléas et Mélisande at the Grand Théâtre de Genève from 26th October to 4th November.
Cherkaoui’s Imperial Ball and Boléro runs from 19th to 25th November.
See upcoming events at Grand Théâtre de Genève.
This article was sponsored by Grand Théâtre de Genève.
