The last two pieces by the South African choreographer can mean everything and its opposite depending on who sees them, and in what context
It’s the same artist, Robyn Orlin, which raised two registers of antagonistic reactions, through two pieces programmed in a single and same first week of the 2022 edition of the Montpellier dance festival. We will call the first In a Corner. And the second We Wear our Wheels. But the concern for seriousness imposes to mention their more exact titles, and extremely long, as it always goes for the pieces of this choreographer. So the first: In a Corner the Sky Surrenders… Unplugging Archival Journeys… #1 (for Nadia). And the second: We Wear our Wheels with Pride and Slap your Streets with Color… We Said « Bhello« to Satan in 1820…
They are two very different pieces. The first is a solo. The second involves nine performers on stage, including three musicians, and among them the singer Anelisa Stuurman, overwhelming with a sovereign form of ingenuity, to be mentioned right away. Çthat is not all. the solo In a Corner is actually very old, it was created and performed by Robyn Orlin herself, originally in 1994. The group room We Wear our Wheels was just glimpsed at Chaillot in the context of the Covid, before tumbling into the great widths for the 2022 edition of Montpellier danse.
On the other hand, we will not hesitate too much to bring together the philosophies. In 1994, Robyn Orlin finished her studies in New York. She feels there as a destitute artist, without a place of welcome. She has become friendly with a homeless man who lives in cardboard boxes. Hence her idea of a play that she will also play in boxes. Then we never saw it in Europe, until its recreation, and transmission to a new interpreter now, Nadia Beugré (we will come back to this below).
As for his new piece, We Wear our Wheels, she is interested in the memory of « rickshaws« Zulus, on the streets of apartheid-era Durban. These young people died before reaching their thirty-five years. Their activity consisted in playing the role of the horse, for the transport of passengers, generally white, in carts with hands. But these “rickshaws” used to adorn themselves with magnificent, fantastic, willingly zoomorphic clothing compositions, to attract attention.
Why connect the two pieces? Because Robyn Orlin’s art very often consists of observing the lives of the poorest, the most oppressed; and to notice the elements of great beauty, moral or directly aesthetic, which emanate from their daily fight for survival. This is what she makes the superb of her scenic material. We are from a world that is built entirely through its images. Robyn Orlin straddles this state of affairs, sometimes with a furious intention of caustic deconstruction, which has to do with performance art (but it doesn’t have to be).
The room We Wear our Wheels thus gives formidable, shattering dimensions to the material elements, to the astonishing energy, to the confusing cloakroom, resulting from the memory of the “rickshaws”. There is something flamboyant, gleaming in the whirlwind of colors, fabrics, physical games, worn loudly by the black members of the South African company « Moving Into Dance Mophatong », with whom the piece was created.
Robyn Orlin it is customary to work with cameras on stage, which deploy live shifted, amplified visions of the unfolding of the action, or the attitudes of the audience in the room. Often this reveals and surprises expectations of the spectacular performance. She gives it to her heart’s content and makes a giant use of it, very spectacular, full of morphing effects, colorizations, variations and serializations, in this new piece.
Incidentally, effects of framing, depth shots, and lighting, focus on the faces of the performers. To some critical onlookers, the cup seemed full then: what did the enthusiastic general public, solicited in well-worn interactive games, good-natured clappers, wanted to cheer on, if not a problematic image of the sweaty good Zulu , smiling, colorful, amazing, all in rhythm in the skin? Should it be taken like this in the first degree? Doesn’t Robyn Orlin’s exaggeration when it comes to thwarting the springs of the image figure in her critical arsenal? It seems that the very brief final explanation, on the racial and colonial tragedy experienced by the “rickshaws”, is not enough to measure up to the upheaval of the exotic surge that the rest of the play provokes.
But we had seen nothing like this in the resumption of the 1994 solo, a week earlier. Its interpretation has been entrusted to Nadia Beugre, a dancer of Ivorian origin, a contemporary woman as she defines herself. His artistic career, already of very strong character, consists in asserting an uncompromising point of view on the world, Africa, France, and particularly the weight of the post-colonial legacy which nourishes their relationship. It was then with the glasses of a very French topicality, of decolonial thought, of wokism and the entry of Ivorian chambermaids as deputy to the assembly, that we were able to read the solo of Robyn Orlyn and Nadia Beugré .
In her box, which has become a magic box, the dancer invents a world of high temperament. She is sovereign, sagacious, busy with her actions, sometimes wonderfully enigmatic, but then questioning, unrolling the objects she transports, as a performer of a free, critical, inventive destiny, to which we ardently want to open up. , rather than close. We know well in our streets, in our lives, such personalities, allegories of all those that the society of control and domination pushes back to its margins, under our averted eyes. This when the Zulus of Johannesburg embodying the “rickshaws” of Durban remain adorned with signs of exotic strangeness that are a little too flashy not to be questioned.
The Montpellier Danse Festival, in Montpellier until July 3. The whole program is here.
Visual: In a corner © Luca Ianelli for Montpellier Danse