It’s been 48 hours since I sat down in the National Arts Centre’s Studio theatre to watch Loin … (Far …), and I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it.
That’s not to say the modern dance, multimedia and theatre production was bad. At times it was deeply thought-provoking and visually stunning, but also very confusing. The production is the brainchild of French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane, a man with a hard, convoluted family history.
Loin…, performed by French dancer Fabrice Lambert, addresses Ouramdane’s confusion regarding his identity as a Frenchman (his mother is French, his father Algerian; both were caught in the violence and in-fighting of the Algerian Revolution in 1954) and issues of ethnic, sexual and even consumer identity on a broader scale.
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Loin… (Far…) Choreographed by Rachid Ouramdane |
The performance was multimedia in every sense of the word. The stage was set with one of the more enigmatic sets I’ve seen in the Studio: a thin horizontal screen ran across the upstage wall, running with French and English subtitles; another long vertical screen displayed images of everything from people to highways to aquarium fish; three rotating gramophones lay scattered about the stage space, pools of what appeared to be blood spilled around them; voices seemed to emerge from every wall, seat and aisle; tying the piece together was the movement of Lambert himself, sometimes slow and controlled, like a spectre, sometimes frantic.
At times it was crystal clear what Ouramdane wanted to convey through Loin …. He interviewed people with the same sort of confused personal histories as his own: a Vietnamese immigrant to the United States, his own mother. Their words were heard as their faces were shown in close-up on the vertical screen. Occasionally the interview footage would stop and Lambert would erupt into dance, body thrashing and contorting to a pounding beat in a visual representation of their pain.
As an artist, Ouramdane seeks to tell personal histories, rather than the kind we might find in a textbook; they cannot be told through mere words, but through the individual’s body, he has said.
Other moments in the performance left me thoroughly confused, like when Lambert treated the different interview subjects’ video feeds as contestants in a game show, or sang a rap-style song that was only half comprehensible through the digital warping of his voice and his thick French accent.
But these confusing moments were outweighed by the beauty of Lambert’s slam-poetry-style narration of Ouramdane’s travels to Vietnam and a particularly poignant moment of dance, when Lambert seemed to be fighting against his very self, his limbs and appendages whipping about as though completely separate from his body.
Overall, I wished for more moments like this one, highlighting Lambert’s controlled technique and raw emotion. Loin … tried too hard to be too many things, and in the end was as confused about its identity as a work of dance and theatre as Ouramdane and his subjects appear to be about themselves.