It may seem an impossible feat to wring joy from the devastation that has swept across the Sahel for nearly a decade – the explosion of jihadist violence and descent into lawlessness and political instability – but choreographer-composer Olivier Tarpaga has done it. In his latest work, Once the dust settles, flowers bloom, the darkness of this world onstage at the Joyce is illuminated by pinpoints of light – and by Tarpaga’s deft and delicate crystallising of a trauma that continues to unspool.
Those pinpoints of light come from lanterns that hang low from the flies, as if illuminating tents within a refugee camp in Tarpaga’s hometown of Kaya, Burkina Faso, in the heart of the Sahel. This makeshift camp today houses hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Burkinabès, mostly women, who have been the primary victims of brutal attacks by armed Islamist marauders.
The men among the cast of seven dancers appear initially with their faces obscured by scarves, eyes shielded by sunglasses, led by a cartoon-like flag-waving militant. Brutality is evoked briefly at the top of the piece, in a stylized assault by one of these men. Later, they shed their extremist gear and join the women of the cast who stand with hand on hip, coolly twitching their hips as if marking time (as if to say, “what took you guys so long?”). These startling shifts in mood chart an absorbing journey that, sans narrative thread, poetically conveys what and how these refugees have endured.
Tarpaga and his creative team evoke a barely suppressed sense of danger with an austere staging and a sound environment that layers hypnotic rock guitar riffs on top of African drums, the harp-like kora and lilting twang of the ngoni. Five musicians sit upstage behind shimmering translucent metallic panels, bearing witness and giving eloquent voice to the dancers’ grief and longings. Early on, the lone female vocalist stands on her chair, regal and urgent, singing of the arrival of refugees to the camp (“dust and shoes everywhere”). An explosion of flip-flops litters the stage. The ensemble race around, playfully tossing the flip-flops in the air. They then collect and place them somberly in a heap under one of the hanging lanterns. Are these meant to be the shoes of displaced people, or the ghosts of the dead and the disappeared? It feels bizarrely right that the flip-flops have been clustered together for safety.
Tarpaga balances these fragile, mysterious devices against a wild exuberance. The dancers’ movement emanates from a steel core, with liquid arms and legs that spiral around the torso. They go from zero to sixty, feet headed in one direction, torso and head in another, powerful arms beating like an eagle’s wings or clipped sharply as if broken.
The women travel, perhaps in search of water and food, a high-risk trek in these environs, making gorgeous sweeping gestures with their arms as if carrying large burdens and beseeching the heavens. The dancing is sometimes ritually slow, then, driven by urgent polyrhythms or the wailing of a guitar or vocal lament, it suddenly erupts. Episodes of magnificent whirling could be expressions of rapture – or frustration at being effectively imprisoned in this camp. In one eerie scene, a man ambles ceremoniously across the stage, balancing a shrouded figure on his shoulders; the twisting, expansion and contraction of the figure under the shroud evokes the dances of those monumental, intricately constructed West African spirit masks that feature in ceremonies meant to drive evil forces away. And yet this masked figure provokes a sense of unease.
Late in the proceedings a man turns up in a camouflage uniform. He seems uncomfortable in the jacket, tries to rip it off. Is he a soldier? A vigilante? He approaches a downstage lantern and sets it swinging out toward the audience; each time it swings back, he ducks it, as if ducking enemy fire. He looks terrified at what he has unleashed.
By the end of the piece, the flip-flops will be gathered up again and fastidiously dispersed into precise square patterns on the ground, under spotlights possibly meant to mark gravesites. Then again, they could be seeds, planted by these dancers in the hope of a more secure and prosperous future. There is much to ponder in this transfixing work of music and dance. What is the significance of the white flowers that each dancer carries in their teeth, then spits out? And the handful of dust which they procure from under the musicians’ chairs? To joyful ululations, they gently tap their chests with their fists, slowly releasing the dust. I was reminded of the 19th century Persian shoes whose insoles were inscribed with a Farsi poem that began, “The dust under your feet is brighter than the sun”.
