As Hip Hop (Re)turns Gérard Mayen
How a choreographic genre can shut itself in an appropriated identity and how certain artists, including Nacera Belaza, nonetheless manage to reopen its potential for contradictions. Reflections.
The setting: the author of these lines, a dance critic, arrives at the train station of a provincial town in France for a festival. The director of that festival is waiting on the platform. He has come to welcome the artists. They include the members of a celebrated hip hop crew. The director realises that the critic has never met that group. He takes it upon himself to make the introductions, with the following remarks (bearing in mind that he is also the director of a ballet in a French opera house): “Would you believe that these young people used to come to practice in front of our opera? Not only did we let them in, but saw to it that they got on stage too!” Though ever so small, the anecdote is nonetheless indicative of the inconceivable approaches of an entire cultural policy geared to hip hop. Its paternalistic fate satisfied and understood. The author of these lines is in a paradoxical situation. He specialises in contemporary dance. He defends the aesthetic options directed at the deconstruction of dramatic performance, the critique of ways of producing and controlling images of the body in the world of dance. The author of these lines must confess that he knows next to nothing about hip hop, when he undertakes to provide an entire text of reflections about it. He has remained remote from hip hop, deploring a performance of extreme codified forms expected as such, the exact opposite of his own opinions for exploration, for the uncertain and the open. Even more confusingly, without having dwelt upon it to date, it is the socio-cultural complex of hip hop in its French variety, and what is implicit therein, that is a source of strong misgivings for him. This recurrent uneasiness was exacerbated in the summer of 2012, during the performance of several shows relating to hip hop which nonetheless revealed completely contradictory approaches. In her play, Le trait, created for the Avignon Festival, Nacera Belaza will have emerged as a protagonist in this aesthetic discussion in gestures, with a particularly pertinent clarifying effect.
Gérard M ayen
For the rest, we are not even certain that she feels much concerned about the question raised here. And it is not a matter of citing her, without her knowledge, to support theories in which she is perhaps not in the least interested. Rather, at issue is to focus on what art does, which is not tp be confused with – and does not fall exclusively back on – what an artist enunciates as revealing her intentions with precision.
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