ARCHIVES 2012 / Puz/zle

How can you find your place in a group? What relationships and organization can exist between the many parts of a whole? How can you be sure you're in the right spot? These questions run through Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's work and are today at the heart of his new creation Puz/zle. The choreography spins the metaphor of the game, giving it new seriousness. In fact, if certain connections succeed in forming an organic whole, other attempts at combinations fail. Human relationships are rolled out or run up against each other in this large emotional, intellectual and carnal puzzle. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and his dancers observed different arrangement and assembling mechanisms at different scales: cellular, family and urban. From them, they selected a process that seems invariable: DNA, bodies as ideas divide, clone and propagate in a movement of perpetual reproduction. It is this movement that gives the play its choreographic principle, between abstraction and concrete reference to the biological and social functioning of the human being. Projection and interweaving games shape a fascinating ritual, heightened by the musical encounter of the Corsican polyphonic group A Fileta, the Lebanese singer Fadia Tomb El-Hage and the Japanese percussionist Kazunari Abe. Music is, as always, central in Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's work: through it, it reminds us here that a composition can have several sources, religious and secular, Christian and Islamic. More broadly, it suggests that traditions are the products of interweaving, crossings. Each of the artists on the stage brings his culture, his voice and his landscapes, inhabiting in community the natural fortress of the Carrière de Boulbon for which the play was designed. RB