"Loin", a dance performance by Rachid Ouramdane in Toronto

[Gustavo Thomas]

Program of "Loin", a dance performance by Rachid Ouramdane in Toronto
Originally uploaded by Gustavo Thomas

I witnessed a strange travel as a spectacle.

A spectacle with an installation as a scenography but also as a structure, almost a dramatic structure.

Imagine an audiovisual installation, where you can listen to music and poems, where you can watch images through video, and see and listen to people who are interviewed about their past, a terrible one.

Imagine a dancer as a poet who sometimes dances, but most of the time he moves his body in slow motion, pushing buttons which turn on music, video or a microphone. The poet recites his poems in a quickly and monotonous way, poems with hard images of his past and images from his last travel to Indochina.

Imagine this poet as a dancer who dance beautifully, in some moments doing it only with his hands with a dark background, then you can only see his hands in movement, like in a photographs with lines of light of a city by night.

Rachid Ouramdane dances very little his poetry, exposes his past through words, through images, in a travel to his father's destiny in Indochina; he exposes all about this travel and its origins as in an art gallery, exhibiting it.

Imagine that we can not feel any identification with him because he never opens the door to it. Even without identification there is no place for a Brechtian theory, this spectacle is only an exhibition, far from theatre and drama, but it is an installation in movement, an installation on stage which speaks and dances.

This is the first time I got this experience from a dance spectacle and I'm interested in what will happen with this strange structure.

Should I say I liked it?

No video allowed inside Enwave Theatre but you can see a video in Youtube with some images of this dance (Loin) and other works.

[Gustavo Thomas]

A pleasure. I'l try to post it in my other Blogs. Thanks to you.

[Marlon Barrios Solano]

Hello Gustavo,
this is an interview with Rachid for the program Dance Tech that I produced last year.
Thank you for your thoughts,
Marlon

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