To create the choreographic material by defining the frameworks of an issue where space and time would be the tools, where the danced movement would be the thread, where the choreographic construction would be an entanglement, the better the complex weaving leading to a work comparable to that of a lace: a score. My milestones are thus posed for this transposition, better still this dematerialization of this object called art, into a movement danced by definition ephemeral. A dematerialization which in a paradoxical way gives all the material to the dance.
For this work I would like to rely on a historical element in order to find the frames that will inspire the forms, the gestures and then the choreographic phrases, that of one of the supposed origins of the lace, that coming from the Orient and connected to the embroidery. Algeria is not the Orient and yet it is the land of this great artistic and literary current called Orientalism. So it is such a 19th century orientalist who came to Algeria to give life to his dreams of the Orient that I would like to give life to my dreams as a child born in France and who only discovered its true origins and those of his two parents, ethnic Algerians. What the day owes to the night – novel by Yasmina Khadra, Director of the Algerian Cultural Center in Paris – is at that moment and at the same place where my parents left everything as they say.
Going on the quest of this day to give it strength and form as one goes in search of the Truth or more exactly of a truth. Lace is above all by definition a way of creating the "day", the day in a fabric, the day in the material …
… the day in my history and why not, without appearing too ambitious and even less pretentious, in history. It constitutes an ideal "pretext", a marvelous transposition of my paths and those traversed by each of the dancers encountered in Algeria, as so many threads mingling and intertwining, so many links also unite us in a history and a geography, that of the great Mediterranean basin.
To celebrate the lace in its refinement, its beauty while attaching itself to a work of memory. This project is at the crossroads of two preoccupations: my taste for the construction and the danced composition and a deep need to bring me closer to my origins in the land of Algeria. Links to be found, others to be renewed and still others to be built.
Chorégraphe Hervé KOUBI / Assistant Fayçal HAMLAT
Dancers: Badr BENR GUIBI, Giacomo BUFFONI, Mohammed ELHILALI, Youssef EL KANFOUDI, Abdelghani FERRADJI, Oualid GUENNOUN, Vladimir GRUEV, Islam KUNAKKULOV, Bendehiba MAAMAR, Nadjib MEHERHERA, Houssni MIJEM, Ayoub ROUIFI, Matteo RUIZ, El Houssaini ZAHID.
Musique: Maxime Bodson, Hamza El Din - Kronos Quartet, Jean-Sébastien Bach, Musique traditionnelle Soufi
Arrangements: Guillaume GABRIEL
Light: Lionel Buzonie
Costumes: Guillaume Gabriel
Production: Compagnie Hervé KOUBI
Coproduction: Ballet de the Opera National du Rhin - Centre Chorégraphique National / Centre Chorégraphique National de Créteil et du Val de Marne – Cie Kafig / Ballet Preljocaj – Centre Chorégraphique National dAix en Provence / Ballet Biarritz – Thierry Malandain – Centre Chorégraphique National
