Dunas

A Long Bet on a New Duet
María Pagés & Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui
da:ns Festival 2009
Esplanade Theatre, Singapore

By Bilqis Hijjas
Photo Courtesy of The Esplanade Co Ltd

When the da:ns Festival at the Esplanade in Singapore commissioned María Pagés and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui to create a new work to headline this year's festival, they were betting big. Usually festival programmers go around the world watching seasons and other festivals, and then they cherry pick the best work for their own event the following year. Commissioned works are usually on a smaller scale, like Boi Sakti's performance in the Esplanade Theatre Studio. To commission a new work as a main attraction, particularly a duet by a new collaborative team, is a risky move.

Some might have thought that the festival programmers' odds were good. Both Pagés and Cherkaoui are accomplished artists. Pagés is a virtuoso solo flamenco performer who also choreographs in the genre for her company which performs internationally. Cherkaoui is one of Europe's hippest choreographers and a darling of the festival circuit. He is well known to Singaporean audiences – four months ago he brought his work Sutra, performed by a group of Shaolin monks, to the Singapore Arts Festival, where it received popular acclaim.

So it was unsurprising that packed houses turned out once again to see Cherkaoui, accompanied by Pagés, premiere their new work for da:ns, inspired by the shifting sands of desert dunes. But the odds turned. Structurally, the performance had a lot riding against it. A duet is a difficult form to sustain for an evening-length performance, even more so on the enormous stage of the Esplanade Theatre. And the differences between the styles of Cherkaoui and Pagés are not naturally complementary.

Pagés, as might be expected from a flamenco prima donna, has a commanding theatrical presence. Her movement is extremely form-based, and finished with a classicist's attention to detail and correctness. She launches into drama without ambivalence, proudly wearing the trademark flamenco scowl. Clad for Dunas in a succession of gorgeous two-toned gowns, she owned the stage, but rarely strayed from the comfort of her flamenco technique.

Cherkaoui, by contrast, is the everyman of dance. His presence is light and unassuming. With his unflattering hairstyle, t-shirts, baggy pants and terrible shoes, he looks like a fashion disaster that has walked in off the street. His physical style is rather post-modernist. It looks as if he has experimented with and discarded all kinds of dance techniques, to end up with his own rather formless, casual and pedestrian movement. He seems happier on the floor rather than standing, where his extreme flexibility makes him look as if he is melting through the stage. 

The result of this unlikely duo is that Pagés and Cherkaoui shine when they are performing alone on the stage, but the work stumbles when they appear together. In the first scene where they are actually dancing together, Pagés performs flamenco steps which Cherkaoui matches. But he is standing diagonally upstage and sometimes a beat or so behind. Thanks to his experience, he never looks like he's trying too hard, and it's interesting for a while to see flamenco movement translated through his body, but in the end he still looks like a loony dance student out of his depth in a difficult class.

There are very few moments of contact between the dancers. A touch of the hand here, a kiss there – these come off as contrived and unconvincing, largely, I suspect, due to Pagés' uncompromising sternness. Their most enduring interaction is expressed in violence. In a long scene, Pagés' trenchant stamping quite unnerves Cherkaoui and literally drives him into the ground. When he attempts to rise, he is at once beaten back by a flurry of footwork. As a scene intending to illustrate the Catholic Spaniards driving the Moors from Spain in the 15th century (Cherkaoui, a Belgian national, has Moroccan parentage, so the analogy is particularly apt) it is successful, but literal and eventually uninteresting.

The most memorable parts of the evening stemmed from dramatic theatrical techniques. Enormous swathes of stretchy, translucent, sand-coloured fabric become the third character on stage. In the opening scene, the dancers approach each other from opposite sides of the stage, until they are checked by sand curtains rising like enormous desert dunes in front of them. They claw their way up the fabric, pulling it down from the ceiling until they can touch hands over it. Later the material moves across the stage to become a multi-layered scrim on which the shadows of the dancers fall in different sizes. The material shrinks to become a shawl which Pagés whirls around her. Then it explodes to hover like a cloud of sand over the stage, onto which Cherkaoui crawls, as if returning to the womb.

Using this versatile material, Cherkaoui presents fascinating illusory effects. By approaching the scrim from behind, he turns a simple solo for himself into a magical duet. He is lit by two diagonal lights and two shadows of himself fall on the scrim. With small clever choreography, moving his left and right sides independently, Cherkaoui has the two shadows express surprise at seeing each other. They touch fingertips. They threaten each other. They fight. Eventually they shake hands and then embrace. It may have been gimmicky, but it was extremely entertaining and the audience loved it. 

The other memorable moment of theatrical magic involved both Cherkaoui and Pagés. Pagés approached the scrim which was suspended upstage. Suddenly lines of energy appeared on the scrim, snaking up from her head and her outstretched fingers. Sweeping motions of her arms made shadows appear and disappear across the sky. An enormous tree of life grew up from her body until it covered the whole backdrop.

The effect was achieved using a lightbox covered in sand, with a camera underneath it. The lightbox was on the side of the stage, and Cherkaoui was drawing in the sand with his fingers. The image collected from the camera was then projected onto the scrim. By watching Pagés' movements closely, Cherkaoui could trace them in the sand, and it appeared that Pages was drawing hugely on the scrim. At one point he swiped the sand away and leaned over the lightbox into the camera's view. To the audience, his face suddenly loomed large on the backdrop, like an evil genius gazing down at the tiny Pagés, a genie caught in his bottle. Although (or perhaps because) they were not dancing together, it was the most successful moment of the show.

For Cherkaoui and Pagés, Dunas was an interesting collaborative experiment. For the audience, it was an evening of great contrasts, alternating between scenes of compelling theatricality or virtuosity and moments that fell flat. For the festival programmers Dunas was a bold move, but ultimately a rash one, a bet that did not pay off.