Dancing with the dark

The Boston Globe features Rachid Ouramdane.

By VALERIE GLADSTONE
Published: May 15, 2008

(Jennifer Taylor for The Boston Globe)
NEW YORK - “Far . . .” begins in near darkness with choreographer Rachid Ouramdane, the French-born son of Algerian parents, barefoot, in jeans and sweatshirt, staring at ripples and patterns flickering on a screen.

“In prison,” a woman says on a recording, “they beat him up. They’d force him to fill up with water and then they’d flatten him. They’d shock him with electricity to make him talk. It lasted two or three months, then they let him go and they sent him to forced labor.” As Ouramdane listens to her describe her husband’s torture by the French in Algeria, her face emerges on the screen and he identifies her as his mother. He takes up the thread and reads his father’s journals from the ’50s, kept during the French occupation of Algeria and later while he served in the French Army in Indochina - today’s Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam - forced to fight other victims of colonialism. The tone remains quiet and concentrated as the tension builds.

Ouramdane’s heart-rending material might lead one to imagine him choreographing a rabidly antiwar work, but this acclaimed experimental artist, now 35, has instead created an exhilarating, subtle, and probing theatrical piece that explores what happens when people must confront their pasts and redefine themselves in relation to war and shifting ideas of nationality. Making his Boston debut, Ouramdane presents this multimedia dance work at the Institute of Contemporary Art tomorrow and Saturday.

“I see myself as a portraitist,” Ouramdane says in perfect English, as intense during a recent interview at a theater here as he is onstage. “I want to create a portrait through the voices of many people. I hope to show that identity is not permanent; it’s layered and ever-changing. I’m not interested in war itself. I’m not here to denounce anything. Wars are part of the history of Western civilization. I’m concerned with what happens afterward. If I had made an angry piece, I would be confronting violence with violence.”

“Far . . .” had its American premiere at Dance Theater Workshop in New York last week, an unusual choice for a venue that usually presents local choreographers. “When I first saw his work,” says Carla Peterson, DTW’s artistic director, “I was very, very impressed with how he dealt with material usually not wrestled with in dance, such as the effects of globalization and people who exist between cultures. He has a very contemporary and poetic way of using his body as a component in his story.”

Over the course of an hour in “Far . . .,” Ouramdane relates tales of fear and terrible cruelty, his voice calm and measured, though at times his hands flutter, seemingly uncontrollably. The faces of people victimized by war appear on the screen, their words revealing their confusion and desolation. He kneels, rolls onto his back, and turns in circles as if embodying their experiences. Tapping his foot on pedals on the floor, he activates incongruously lively music and begins undulating and swinging his head in a sinuous “smurf,” a kind of French urban hip-hop. Gradually he constructs a collage resonant with implied connections.

Ouramdane spent two years collecting the elements for “Far . . .,” starting with his father’s journals, and then setting off to Vietnam to retrace his father’s footsteps. “The impetus partly came from my own background,” he says. “But my real object was to discover how people cope in the aftermath of war. I interviewed and filmed Americans and Vietnamese along the way. Some had intentionally developed amnesia about the past. I don’t blame them; I can’t judge. I know I come from a very safe place.”

When he returned, he worked on the video, then integrated it with movement, spoken word, and music. He doesn’t have a company, nor does he want one. He keeps only two administrators and rarely collaborates with the same people twice, for each project bringing together whatever and whoever is necessary.But themes recur. In an earlier work, “Discreet Deaths,” Ouramdane explored the meaning of identity through the prism of teenage suicide, which he researched online. He staged the performance in a space that looked like a boxing ring whose rails pulsed with colored liquids, like veins or medical tubes. He choreographed “Surface de reparation,” which refers to a penalty box, for 12 teenage athletes from the Parisian suburb of Gennevilliers, where he is choreographer in residence at a theater. For a year they trained with him, the final result a combination of filmed interviews and their own athletic prowess. And “Superstars,” a commission from the Ballet de l’Opera de Lyon, consists of seven solos for dancers of different nationalities, once again addressing the way people’s histories and present realities overlap.

Ouramdane grew up poor in a housing project in the town of Annecy, and by 6 he was dancing in the street, picking up whatever the older kids were doing. At 15, he started contemporary-dance classes and continued them while studying at the University of Paris. Afterward, he won acceptance at the prestigious Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers. Since then he has worked as dancer and artistic adviser with artists such as Hervé Robbe and Odile Duboc. It was with the latter troupe that he began using video; today he refers to himself as a multimedia artist, not a choreographer.

“In my studies, it was never the dance or movement discipline that most interested me,” Ouramdane says, “but the person who taught it. I’ve always gotten the most out of watching people. I like to see how they express themselves through different postures, and probe their emotional and imaginary worlds. I don’t really practice a technique, which may be a mistake because I’m hurting myself more and more. I’ll jump in the air and think I can fly and then fall to the floor - and it hurts!”

Ouramdane finds his heroes in all the arts. “I love William Burroughs and all the Beat writers, and I’m very impressed with the documentary filmmaker Chris Marker,” he says. “Everything he does is based in reality. . . . I think that after years of abstraction, it’s time for artists to return to reality. I want to learn how a soul, after dealing with violence, finds a way to absorb it and still be human. That’s not abstract; that’s real.”