The weft remains loose, but the bodily perception is attentive, and the reciprocal observation meticulous. Each time that the motifs are performed as a solo, they are not seen as an exploit in a circus performance, but as a fully-fledged person in the process of acting. Everything remains subtly suspended, and major collective motifs can occur through the rationale of a group working on itself and assuming the form of vast, encompassing rituals. Whereas the dominant gestural language of this show is hip hop, it is offered as an infectious sign of body to body, shared between those among the group’s dancers that raise it into a privileged idiom. Yet all this vibration of circulation without racket, gets this gestural code across as a potentially universal vocabulary, instead of designating it as an agreed marker of an intra-exotic singularity, teeming with clichés of alterity subjected to the image injunctions of media omnipotence. There the bodies breathe – including bodies of spectators. In Le trait at the Avignon Festival, Nacera Belaza took the risk of upsetting her art. That art has from the outset been constructed almost exclusively as a duo, composed by the choreographer herself and her sister Dalila. They have embarked on a persevering exploration of a minimalist and repetitive gestural range stretched over infinitesimal modulations of tension. For these two bodies, engaged in infinite swaying or turns, seemingly apt to levitate, movement seems to stem from a general vibration of the world, which the dancer has made momentarily perceptible. A body that receives the spiritual emotionalism that permeates reality – not a body projected in the production of expressionist gestures for exteriority. Something escapes indefinitely in the chasms of interiority, through the dance of Nacera Belaza. Two hip hoppers are present on stage in Le trait. How can their posture of alterity be defined at the locus of a Nacera Belaza whom many Western spectators will insist in capturing in the posture of the perpetuated foreign remanence of the immigrant? The two hip hoppers working alongside Nacera Belaza are from Algiers. They are thus living the present in a cultural context that is always strongly pervading the contemporary consciousness of choreography. A part from that, the distance between the very idea of dance that can be cultivated by these two dancers on the one hand, and the choreographer and her sister on the other, seems immeasurable.
Gérard M ayen
In Le trait, the pair of hip hoppers has been assigned a proprietary singular sequence. The crudest exterior signs of their appearance are erased by the identical sober clothing and parsimonious lighting, as is always the case with Nacera Belaza. This is not the stage of a TV show. The two lads are presented straight up, side by side, facing the public. Their entire person is committed, perceived soberly as a whole, and not in extreme games of dismemberment, distortion and isolation of gestural segments, in hectic 3D, which the common eye expects from hip hop.
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