ARCHIVES 2009 / Loin...

Rachid Ouramdane is alone on the stage, but his solo is very populated. There is first of all the presence of his father, that father both colonised (as an Algerian, he was badly treated by the French) and colonizer (a soldier, he fought in Indonesia under the French flag). This father whose life the show evokes, with its ellipses, its secrets, its taboos, but also the filial link reconstructed thanks to the memories confided. Next come several filmed interviews that Rachid Ouramdane conducted in Vietnam, following in his father's footsteps and in the United States, where the young choreographer met witnesses from another war of colonisation, the one carried out by America in that same country, a few years later. If Rachid Ouramdane is not alone, surrounded by sounds, images and voices, his dance never mimics others, it is not a scowl of the war waged far away, nor a reconstitution of the violence those colonised were subjected to. It is something else, masked, moving and surprising. Its minimalism says, better than grand effects, the feeling of being a stranger everywhere, even at home. As if dance wanted to dig into that feeling, infiltrate it using measured and simple gestures. To better show its violence. Through impulses suddenly invading a badly treated body, through bursts of voices and big steps striding across the four corners of the stage, through the smothering of a face behind a veil, that seeks air and help. This help will not come: Rachid Ouramdane is alone and far away, with the sounds, images and voices that possess him, with the text he has written on the malaise he felt in Vietnam, where he was taken for a coloniser whereas he is the son of the colonised. He is alone and far away, but his show brings this strangeness and the stranger strangely close to us. ADB