French artist Rachid Ouramdane’s solo connects all three themes of iDANS Festivals so far. Loin...(Far…) is a multi-media performance which explores the conflicts between identity and experience of foreignness, tracing a series of autobiographic, poetic and choreographic journeys through Algeria, Cambodia and Vietnam; and through his father’s diaries during his military service in Indochina. It is a performance which exposes the continuity of emotions across the figures of the colonizer and the colonized as ambiguous positions in an endless game of mirrors.

A journey is often the opportunity to revisit, the moment to take stock of one’s identity or rather one’s identities. Those we have inherited, those we embody in the eyes of others and those we project to ourselves, that we try to emancipate. Whether national, economic, ethnic, minority, cultural, sexual, psychological or affective, a journey brings into question all of these layers of identity, which form new configurations throughout our movements. The different faces we have often result from a negotiation between the legacy of the past and the identity that is being constructed in the present. It is during these movements that the feeling of being a FOREIGNER appears. Our assumed differences and our poor understanding of elsewhere create a place where we can rethink our perceptions. This crossroads of thought is the axis around which I have constructed this choreographic project.

During a recent journey to Vietnam and to Cambodia, I discovered a new way to explore this feeling of being a foreigner. In a discussion about the violence of the conflicts that have torn these countries apart, I remembered the pages of my father’s military papers; my father, who was made to crush this Indochina of earlier times. As the discussion progressed, because of my French nationality, I realized that I was considered the son of a colonialist, even though what linked my father to Indochina was the legacy of another colonization, that to his country, Algeria. Once again during this conversation, it struck me what the disorder and devastation caused by the violence of armed conflicts could lead to in terms of creating an image of the foreigner in many areas of the world. In what way does the violence of armed conflict make us foreign? What reactivity is born out of this violence? These are the questions addressed in this itinerant project; a project that will trace the steps of a journey made more than 50 years ago. - Rachid Ouramdane

Conception and performance: Rachid Ouramdane | Music: Alexandre Meyer | Video: Aldo Lee | Light : Pierre Leblanc | Costume and make up: La Bourette | Set: Sylvain Giraudeau | Realisation assistant: Erell Melscoët | Stage management and sound: Sylvain Giraudeau | Video management: Jenny Teng | Lighting management: Stéphane Graillot | Production: L’A.| Coproduction: Théâtre de la ville à Paris, Bonlieu, scène nationale d’Annecy, Biennale de la danse de Lyon | With the help of: Le Fanal, scène nationale de Saint-Nazaire for the residency of création | With the support of: Cultures France, Wonderful district à Hô-chi-minh – Vietnam, de L’Ambassade de France au Vietnam – L’Espace, Centre culturel à Hanoï et le service de coopération et d’action culturelle à Hô-Chi-Minh and the Théâtre 2 Gennevilliers.

The choreographer Rachid Ouramdane likes to hide his face behind his masks. Whether under a clown's make-up, behind a metallic sculpture or inside a motorbike crash helmet, the face, the mystery of the person, is concealed to focus the gaze elsewhere. According to the choreographer, though the mask is a way to display the myriad facets of his fragmented personality, he also maintains that one's identity is a bottomless pit, an illusion to which the face gives a single interpretation. By altering the appearance, the mask enables the body to develop new strategies to exist in other ways and erases the contours that are too easy to read. Since the creation of the company ‘Association Fin Novembre’, cofounded with Julie Nioche, Rachid Ouramdane, who for many years interpreted the works of choreographers Odile Duboc, Hervé Robbe, Meg Stuart and Emmanelle Huynh, has tried to lift the veil of obviousness that covers everything. For this discreet man, the son of Algerians who sought refuge in silence, the words denied to his parents'generation on the Algerian war of independence in an open wound that the stage allows him to soothe. In Au bord des métaphores (2000), video was used to pulverize identities with the risk of becoming lost in surface effects. For + ou - là (2002), inspiration came from television and its icons, from the narcissism of the new media. Directly connected on the internet, in Les Morts pudiques (2004), a solo self-portrait fuelled by research on youth and death, life blood flowed through plastic tubes of pure medical beauty. The play on images, on signs, and on their ambivalence electrifies Rachid Ouramdane's performances, often comparable to secret ceremonies for mutants who've broken free. For example, in Cover

- Rosita Boisseau, Panorama de la danse contemporaine, éditions textuel, 2006 (2005), a precious monochrome created after a series of visits to Brazil, men painted from head to toe in gold paint circle the stage, contemporary idols sucked into the twilight with no return.

Further Reading:

www.rachidouramdane.com

NY Times 10 May 2008

Village Voice_20.05.08_ Deborah Jowitt

Boston Globe_17.05.08:

Ballet-Dance.com_2008.08_Theodore Bale