"World Fair"
Rachid Ouramdane
New York Live Arts
New York, NY
October 15, 2011
By Carol Pardo
Copyright ©2011 by Carol Pardo
In his work, Rachid Ouramdane explores the effects of the political on the physical, not a surprising juxtaposition for a dancer born in France of Algerian immigrant parents within memory of the upheaval of 1968. The subject of "Ordinary Witnesses," shown at New York Live Arts by the company L'A earlier this same week, is the effect of torture on the body. "World Fair," a solo with an extra walk-on part, explores "notions of nationhood and identity by examining the relationship between the body and power" (according to the press kit) and co-opts confusion and its by-product menace to do it. Almost everything in the piece is open to interpretation, even the title. "Exposition universelle," as it is known in French, is usually translated as world’s fair. Is the lost possessive the result of Google translator, or a conscious choice: a just world or a beautiful one (heavy on the irony)?
The black box theater at New York Live Arts is tricked out to resemble a sleek hi-fi geek’s paradise or a holding pen designed by Aubrey Beardsley, all black and white and slithering lines. (Photographs taken at its premiere in Avignon earlier this year, the brickwork of a cloister suggested a dungeon.) The stage is littered with musical instruments, sound equipment, and big rectangular objects, face down, which turn out to be video monitors. As the audience files in, two record players with vinyl discs spinning are front and center. Behind them a large weighted arc light turns and dips, coyly curtseying to the audience. Later it will intimidate and bleach secrets from a detainee under interrogation. At the far end of the stage a man (Ouramdane himself) stands motionless on a revolving stool. Is he the great leader receiving the adoration of his people, or a broken man, subject to a new form of torture from the people who brought you waterboarding, being mocked? This goes on for a cool quarter of an hour, long enough for motion sickness to set in on at least one side of the footlights. Finally, the choreographer shrugs off his shirt and starts moving, and he moves beautifully, effortlessly controlling each joint and sinew. All too soon, that fluidity hardens into the dutiful response of a participant at a Strength through Joy rally, then further into that of a participant at a Strength through Joy rally on spiked Kool-Aid. Power grinds the body into submission. In case we didn’t get the message the first time round, later in the fifty-five minute long piece, there is another solo, focusing on the legs and using tap as its starting point. But the result is the same.
The vacuum left by the receding dance impetus is taken up by Ourmadane’s made up face seen in both two dimensions and three: blackface, whiteface, red white and blue camouflage—do imperialist powers under other colors get a bye?—other faces. The arc light revolves and sways, the discs keep turning, the world keeps turning. Someone is always the oppressor, someone else the oppressed. Ouramdane is to be congratulated for tackling tough ideas; if only "World Fair" were not so remote, so encased in its own bubble. Watching it, we see the parts, but not the whole, the potsherds, but not the funerary urn.
