Rehearsal
27/05/2013
“ ‘But can you sing with your head down, a spinning top on the sole of your left foot, and a sword balanced on the sole of your right foot?’
‘Why, of course I can!’ answered Passepartout, recalling the first performances of his early years.
‘You see, everything depends on that,’ replied the Honourable Batulcar.” – Around the World in 80 Days
“All right, is everyone ready?”
“Yes, we’re all good. Totally ready and primed to start dancing.”
“You appear to be doing yoga.”
“What? Doing yoga? We’re just stretching and warming up so we don’t hurt ourselves. You wouldn’t want us to hurt ourselves, would you? Would you? Did you hear that? She thinks we’re doing yoga!”
“Doing yoga!”
“Preposterous!”
“Everyone get over here now!”
“Down dog.”
“That’s not very nice. Just because I’m a bit hot and sweaty today and didn’t put on any makeup. Shut up.”
“No, downward dog. It’s a yoga pose. It’s a really good deep back stretch actually.”
“Is it? Let me see…”
“Everyone stop doing yoga, get over here right now and start rehearsing the Brazilian!”
“Doing yoga! I can’t believe you think we’re doing yoga. We’re just – ow. Ok. I’m coming.”
“I still look like a Cockney cheeky chappie when I try to do that walk.”
“No, Rachel, you’re getting much better at it!”
“Any old iron, any old iron, any any any old iron…”
“There’s only a few of us here today, the group wave is going to be more of a…gentle current.”
“All right, time for saidi.”
“I don’t have a stick.”
“Just mime it.”
“But remember that you’re not actually really holding it. So don’t try to centre yourself on it or rest your weight on it. Because it’s, you know, not there.”
“’Cause you know that bit where we hit the floor with it really hard…”
“Yeah, if you forget that you’re not really holding it and you get a bit too enthusiastic with it, then you might – oh. Oh dear.”
“Ooh, nasty.”
“Are you ok?”
“Mmph.”
“I told you to be careful. You know what you did? You sticked without a stick.”
“I’ll tell you what you can stick-”
“All right, awesome. Top banana. Cancan?”
“Wow, look at them.”
“They look amazing.”
“It’ll be even better once the costumes are done.”
“I don’t know, cancan in leggings, headbands and oversized T shirts…I think that’s coming into vogue in Paris.”
“Voulez vous?”
“Hawaiian?”
“Oh yes. This one’s tricky. All the turns.”
“You just need to be careful with the turns because of all the pillars in this room and – whoa, that was close.”
“Ow.”
“I’ve got it quite well now. It’s sort of a ‘whip’ and a ‘whee’ and a ‘woohoo’! Yes! Top banana! Hey, I’m starting to speak Tati.”
“It’s a whole new language. Unique, distinctive, somewhat quirky and very expressive.”
“How appropriate.”
“Seems that we’re all picking stuff up. Absorbing things with rehearsals and practise.”
“Yes, seems we are.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Ok everyone, that was great. Everyone’s looking really good. Don’t forget to keep practising at home.”
“Practise makes perfect, after all.”
“Yes, it does. It really does.”
On Passion
06/05/2013
“Was there brewing within his breast one of those pent-up storms of wrath that are all the more terrible because they are repressed, and that burst at the very last moment with resistless force?” – Around the World in 80 Days
One day I turned up for my usual class with Tatiana Woolley. I was looking forward to it – I always do – but I wasn’t expecting to dance very well. I was preoccupied, and had been for several days.
The class started and we began to rehearse the dance we were learning. I am synaesthetic, as it happens – literally “together sensed” – and I feel colours, in sounds, scents, emotions and physical sensations. It is involuntary and such an intrinsic element of how I perceive the world that I am not always completely aware of it. (I was 25 before I discovered not everybody does it.) The track, Aa Tayar Hoja, was a poetic knit of sexy scarlets, shifting sapphires and crashes of silver. And somewhere in my mind, though I wasn’t fully conscious of it, the last few days were forming a diamond in my mind, gathering as it spun like candyfloss on a stick. It twirled with red for passion and anger, the pearl grey of sheer loss and sorrow, flashes of yellow where I could be happy for a few moments, the pinks and purples and oranges of frustration, denial and something indefinable. Half the class was watching as I danced with some fellow students, with the diamond throwing a thousand points of coloured light on every surface in my mind, all sorrow and sadness and sensuality. I didn’t know it, but I was dancing out the diamond in my mind, the shifting, twinkling colours, the spectrum of my essence in angry, earthy stomps, seductive thrusts, innocent and coy retreats, the covered face, the sensuous hips.
When the dance ended I felt flushed and strangely unburdened. Tatiana clicked the music off.
“Rachel…what were you thinking about while you were dancing?” she asked. I hemmed and tried to think. “Mostly…what the heck’s the next step, I think,” I said, with a little laugh. Which was also true. She smiled. “You were so passionate,” she said. “It was really coming through in your dancing. I’d love to know what you were thinking.” As we got changed, Lisa Ward (our cartoonist) also approached me. “You were just so clearly feeling the music!” she enthused. “You were going from sad to coquettish to fiery…it was amazing to watch!” I felt my face burn even as I thanked her. Somehow, without realising, I had communicated something to my audience, exposed more than I realised or intended, without a word. I felt…embarrassed.
As we rehearse our dances for Around the World in 80 Days, we need to make sure our technique and choreography are well-rehearsed and smoothly executed. But our dance is not about being technically perfect automatons. From the fiery passion of Brazil to the sweeping veils of China, from Phileas Fogg’s love and seeming defeat to ultimate victory, we must communicate the passions, emotions and characters of the places and people we portray.
It’s risky. We might find our spirits and secrets overspill into it more than we realised. But that’s what art is about, communicating even when you don’t intend to. Singing rainbows. Dancing diamonds.
This is Aouda
15/04/2013
“She was a young woman, with skin as white as a European’s. Her head, neck and shoulders, her ears, arms, hands and toes were weighed down with jewels, necklaces, bracelets, earrings and rings; and a tunic spangled with gold, and veiled with light muslin, showed the outline of her figure.”
- Around the World in 80 Days
The woman in the middle of the room is tall and slender, with delicate bones and flowing hair. Draped in layers of fine red chiffon, she was marched on with her hands held fast behind her back and now, as ominous drums beat a rhythmic knell, she raises her arms to the sky, wrists twisting, and begins a balletic dance of despair, dipping and swirling her torment and sorrow. Sometimes she extends her arms in entreaty to those around her, but to no avail; they turn away, raising their hands in refusal. And so she is left nothing but her dance, gradually stripping away her chiffon layer by layer, to meet her fate utterly defenceless. Aouda, the beautiful Indian princess doomed by the suttee ritual to die on her husband’s funeral pyre.
Actually she is Beatriz Olmos, our Spanish dancer, known in the Collective for her love of flamenco. “The sad truth is, I’ve never read Around the World in 80 Days,” she confesses. “It’s definitely not as famous in Spain as it seems to be here.” Argh! Argh!
But she understands Aouda’s story. “In the dance, I’m trying to create a feeling of despair but also mixed with resignation,” Beatriz explains. “She knows she’s going to die, she’s known it for a while and has no real hope that someone will come and rescue her. That’s what I’m trying to say in the dance. What I like the most about doing this is how dynamic the process of choreographing the dance is. I’m not just learning a choreography, I’m making it grow, putting more into it when I carry it out.”
It comes naturally to her. “I love dancing. I couldn’t understand hearing a song and not moving to it, whatever style it is, even if I don’t know what it’s about, even if the way I’m moving doesn’t make sense. When I dance, I feel the music and somehow that makes me feel so free. I feel so relaxed afterwards, as if I released something that was caged inside me.” Beatriz pauses, collecting herself. “Wow, that came out poetic!”
Of course, as we know, Aouda is indeed rescued (some dramatic subterfuge from Passepartout), ultimately to fall in love with Phileas Fogg, releasing his own inner passion. In the book, Aouda was drugged and insensible when she was taken to her place of execution; our Aouda will dance the anguish the princess would have felt before she was clouded with hemp and opium. This is as it should be; dance is an art form that should be poetically, if not literally, truthful. Which will certainly be the case when our own Fogg and Aouda begin to fall in love in a sexy, contemporary Bollywood number.
And that, as they say, is another story.
He’s our Yan
04/04/2013
“The eccentric gentleman’s object was sport, not
money.” – Around the World in 80 Days
Pity Yan Zacks. For the next three months, he’s
undergoing intense one to one training sessions
with a beautiful dance teacher, in preparation for
taking the lead role of Phileas Fogg on stage amongst
a passionate female chorus. He’ll be spending weeks
and weeks surrounded by women, the centre of their
attention and the focus of their dancing. The poor, poor
guy. No wonder he’s losing his grip on his hat.
“The hats are such a major part of this Baba Karam
dance,” Tatiana is explaining to him. Her own fedora
seems to be a dancer itself as it flips and twirls in her
hands. Yan already has some experience of this; he has been through a Baba Karam lesson, the only male in the room as throngs of women grunted, punched and swaggered their way around the space. A lesser man might have caved, but he came through admirably.
“Remember, head slides!” Tatiana calls out as she circles him. “Sharp moves, lock, shoulder rolls, twirl the hat…Loosen up. You’ve got to get into character, to let go!” Her artful machismo is quite acrobatic. Yan seems to be getting into the beat now, even inventing a new move, flexing his biceps and swinging his arms. It looks great. “Yes!” Tatiana shouts in delight. “That’s perfect! Now come on, fight me!” She dances up to him and gives him a boisterous little shove. Yan meets her dead on and jabs an uppercut in her direction. “Come on! I know I’m a woman, but I’m very strong! I once knocked my husband out!” Yan gets a panicked look on his face and shrinks back a bit, waggling one fist in the air. I push myself to the end of my bench, well out of her turning circle. “No, no!” she shouts. “It was an accident! Honest!”
The music plays and the two dancers begin to spar, twirling their fedoras, ducking and dodging. Yan darts forward and snatches Tatiana’s hat off her head. He’s found his inner Baba Karam.
“That feels good, actually,” he says with a flushed grin as the music finishes and ebbs in the air. “Hm, I don’t think I’d realised how tense I am. I’m getting looser the more I do it, though.
“I do love to dance. I used to do some really hardcore dancing in the rock scene; it could be a real anger workout, I had a lot of anger at that time. I’ve moved on from that now and now I like to listen to things that are brighter, bouncier. Dancing for me is a way of expressing these feelings.”
Phileas Fogg would have understood personal growth like this. Travelling the world took him from taciturn Victorian reserve to adventure, love and passion. Here’s hoping Yan’s own dance journey will prove just as fulfilling for him.
Baba Karam
22/03/2013
“It seemed to him a terrible thing to have to guide so many ladies at once through the vicissitudes of life, to have to lead them as a team up to the Mormon paradise…No, no, such a life did not appeal to him; and – he was possibly mistaken – it occurred to him that the ladies of Great Salt Lake City cast rather disquieting glances at his person.” - Around the World in 80 Days
“Urgh,” Laura grunted at me.
“Urgh,” I shot back, sticking out my lower jaw to give myself a Neanderthal-like underbite.
“Grrrr,” she snapped, flexing her biceps menacingly.
I shoved my crotch back at her. “GRRR!” I snarled.
Seema skulked up towards us, glowering. Though naturally very pretty and petite, she was circling her arms and shoulders like some kind of lumbering barbarian halfwit, and seemed twice her usual size. She stuck her jaw out at us and jabbed a couple of rhythmic upper cuts in our direction. I sneered and turned to swig at an imaginary pint of beer, pausing only to cast a contemptuous glance at the others every so often.
Across the room, women were prancing and strutting with legs akimbo, tilting hats they weren’t really wearing, shrugging and posing, wordlessly inviting everyone about them to come and have a go if they think they’re hard enough, all to the rhythm of a drumbeat that was filling the room. I bet I’m sweating testosterone, I thought. Good!
It’s a strangely liberating experience for a woman to dance Baba Karam for the first time; one could argue that the female appropriation of this masculine dance form is also a form of emancipation. Baba Karam has its roots in Persia and is traditionally male territory. Today, however, it is commonly performed by women, resulting in some curious but intriguing gender bending. In a world where women are generally expected to behave decorously and delicately, it’s quite delicious to be able to swagger about, taking up as much space as you like, laying claim to anything you want, possessing and owning your emotions along with your physical being. Men can be angry, but women are irrational; men are tormented but women are drama queens; men are firebrands but women are hysterical. Well screw every one of these injustices, I thought as I lurched around the room. I can feel anything a man can feel, I have the same right. I can do anything a man can do, except perhaps pee standing up. And there was something brilliant in parodying these gender stereotypes, over exaggerating them to the point of comedy, making a mockery of them, turning them into caricatures, tearing them down. Urgh! Grrr!
I went home that evening tired but happy, pleasantly drained, looking forward to bed. I had a funny desire to wear pyjamas instead of a pretty nightdress, though. My husband was home when I walked in the door.
“So how was your dance lesson?” he asked.
“Urgh!” I barked at him, thrusting my crotch and gulping another phantom pint. “Grrr!” Then I stomped upstairs to bed. Poor husband. Baba Karam may no longer be an exclusively masculine art, but it seems men will continue to be affected by it nonetheless.
Shikatt at NDC's Around the World in 80 Days production
14/03/2013
"Aouda looked into his face. The sincerity, the candour, the firmness and sweetness of that glorious look of a noble woman, daring all to save the man to whom she owed all, first astonished and then thrilled him.” – Around the World in 80 Days.
The beat was hypnotic and I was slipping under. There was no melody, but this was not one of the familiar drum solos of belly dance. Not a strong, fiery piece where every sharp pop and drop could itself be striking a drumskin, but a soft, rhythmic pulse, the beats themselves musical. With heavy swaying and soft shoulder shimmies, the drum was as mesmerising and dreamy as if we were dancing underwater. But as it progressed it began to fire up, quickening and more urgent, calling for fast shaking hips and hair, until finally crashing out on a crescendo that hung in the air for several moments before it truly dissolved.
This is shikaat – a Moroccan folk dance style, traditionally performed by the female elders of a community, whose very name has roots in the words for ‘wise women’. “Think of it this way,” Janet* said as we swayed and shook about the room. “You’re the ones the younger women come to with their problems, they trust you, they know you. You’ve lived. You’ve loved. Maybe you’ve lost. And it’s all come together in who you are now, what you know, what you can share, what you can teach.” She began to toss her head from side to side, a fluid motion that slung her long dark hair from shoulder to shoulder. As she shimmied up towards me, I found myself mirroring her moves without conscious volition. “Like this,” she smiled, as we bobbed and dipped around each other as if we’d rehearsed it. “This is an earthy dance. This is about joining communities, bonding with each other. She’s my sister. I tell her my problems, she tells me hers. We get up close, we aren’t self conscious, we aren’t shy. Why would we be?”
Phileas Fogg never passed through Morocco during his fabulous journey around the globe, though he did stop at Suez in Egypt, also in North Africa. At that point he was still in exclusively male company, having not yet reached India, where he and his companions would save the life of the lovely Aouda. Perhaps this was one reason why he had no interest in going ashore to explore the town. He had not yet met a woman who could unlock his latent passion – for love and, ultimately, life itself.
Our own culture often seems to have little respect for its elders, and its elder women in particular. Yet these are the people who have lived through all the experiences that shake and unsettle us, who can reassure us that the storms will pass and we will be stronger for them. They have seen the world change, yet remain constant to tell us about the times we never saw. It’s a lot to put into a dance, but if anything can express wisdom, serenity, passion and femininity in all its hues…it has to be shikaat.
*Janet Rose, co-director of Around the World in 80 Days with Tatiana Woolley
Rachel Elisheva Reeves, NDC blogger and dancer