Badke: Co-production with KVS (Royal Flemish Theatre)/Les ballets C de la B/Palestinian A.M. Qattan Foundation at the Fleck Dance Theatre, Harbourfront Centre.
To know dabke, a joyous, celebratory dance of richly traditional Levantine Middle Eastern origins is to know a wonderfully vibrant living culture but to know the show Badke, is to truly get to know its heart and soul.
Badke, which just ran as a series of very fine shows at the Fleck Theatre this past week as part of the Harbourfront Centre World Stage program, takes its spirited origin from word-play on the dabke dance genre, widely performed today with diverse types of professional and non-professional line and circle dancers consisting of both instrumental and vocal genres. Its origins are broad and may include all-male, all-female, or mixed lines, depending upon the country of inspiration, and often featuring a soloist as leader. The tradition is rich, well documented, can be highly varied from country to country and, above all, is exciting to watch and to take part in.
Co-created by Koen Augustijnen, Rosalba Torres Guerrero and dramaturge Hildegard De Vuyst, Badke was conceived four years ago between KVS (the Royal Flemish Theatre) and the highly regarded contemporary dance company Les ballets C de la B, along with the cultural/educational body A.M. Qattan Foundation which supports such initiatives originating in the occupied territories. Although the toots of this particular show are Palestinian, there was a definite broader appeal to dabke-originated cultures in general that was inviting, engaging, and made you want to get up on stage and join them in a line without any hesitation.
Sporting a cast of six men and four women, the hour-long-plus work opens with what looks like a 20-minute wedding dance. It is mostly unflagging fun and relentlessly social in both its casual dress and energetic manner. Yet, for all its apparently uncerebral tone, there are many deeply planned ideas offsetting the initial party mood with a much more serious tenor that interweaves like a braid of tension, entwining the dancers with its inevitable presence, at times revealing, at times disturbing.
The dancers express a splendid diversity of training including hip hop, street, capoeira, parkour, Kung fu, African taos, break dance, popping, locking and acrobatics. And then of course, there is dabke itself, often set in broadly phrased groupings of 4-step dancing, frequently characterized instrumentally and vocally with agogically-placed, off-the-beat, rhythmically infectious stomps and taps, claps and movements, all for hips and legs, that drew in not only all the dancers but even moved the spectators in their seats.
The linear or circular formations, in this incarnation, feature men and women integrated into elaborate choreographies, with women often taking the lead in line formations, expressing exquisite variations integrating multiple dance traditions thereby creating a rainbow of variety in their step routines of refined albeit seemingly spontaneous beauty.
Add to this the effusive variety of the dancers’ own personal stories, derived from diverse homeland roots, most of whom reside or originate from several areas within Palestine, including Nablus, Ramallah, Nazareth and a variety of Galilean villages. While it is true that many have trained in Europe in classical dance (even a grand jeté and entrechats made their way perfectly into the show and didn’t appear out of place at all), such influence stands as minority player, just like the use of any other dance tradition in the show, comprising merely one component in an exquisite potpourri of this resplendent dancing banquet.
Most remarkable is the troupe’s collective capacity to reconcile with minimal cognitive and kinesthetic dissonance, the traditions of past and present, weaving them into a well-quilted texture of considerable artistic mettle. Such well-worn creative ability does the group credit, launching them toward an assured place as an internationally recognized group, one that can integrate its folk traditions into a truly synthesized art form no less part of the pastiche comprising twenty-first-century global dance culture. After all, if all of us wish to be exponents of movement and dance as the most expressive art form and the most vibrant palette that can express our humanity, then Badke is the way to go.
Equally important is the stated goal at the outset that the group does not want to create an art that expresses victimization over the many injustices carried out in the occupied territories. Dance is always the best medium to express hardship and conflict, and here, the conflict lies entirely within, as evinced by the clashes between group celebration and multiple offset solos and duets of contorted crisis bubbling over with hostility and, at times, scarcely muted violence. These are often shocking moments that crescendo and decrescendo sharply throughout the show, illustrating the similarity of flaring and waning tensions found in multiple regions of political conflict.
Badke makes a convincing display of this sort of “bad”ness, suffusing dabke’s celebrations with hidden tensions while making the show’s overarching narrative stand for something more broadly universal to be found in all human cultures. In every unceasing energetic expression, is there not a fine line we sometimes walk between ebullience and explosion? And in this instance, it is a party that goes on too long, deliberately, by the admission of the show’s creators, just to show that the fine line gets walked a lot, between endless rhythm, and violent conflict. It was an appropriate message that made its way clearly into the audience’s minds, judging by the reactions I overheard after the show.
In addition, the party atmosphere presented several interesting twists, including a mock power outage that shuts down Naser Al-Fares’s excellent soundtrack for a few minutes. But the dancers simply re-invent their own score by whistling in the dark and start up the dance anyway to capital effect. The effect felt akin to the dark stomping of basic dabke rhythms at the beginning, as if to instruct its audience in the basics, until the lights came on ten minutes into the show and Al-Fares’s score can truly begin.
But most interesting was the sense of narrative extension that the music and dance scaffolded into the show as a whole. When the show continued one panel too long as planned, as if the varieties of dance and the loud party could not stop along with the innate tensions they were representing, it was as if the music and movement were trying to block out a subconscious world that persistently intervened from outside, something like what the power outage was meant to symbolize and effectively convey.
The work’s scaffolding appears to build on typical task-based assignments that the dancers took to different artistic levels. Individuated movement was constrained by strong elements of listening as dancers paired off frequently so as to hear and feel each other’s rhythms. Multiple speeds, from slow to very fast were liberally mixed together, even in violent apposing counterpoint, whether in duos or in small/large ensemble oppositions. It was constantly stimulating, artistically satisfying, and filled with import that added up to a significant creative statement about dance as multilayered representation of interminably complex, overlapping cultures. Despite their presentation of multiple choreographic layers, it was a masterstroke watching them keep all the vocabularies straight.
Sometimes elements that were rehearsed only in fun, even as a joke, would end up in the show anyway, adding further to the strong element of that quasi-improvised spontaneity throughout, which was a relief to witness. One thing was certain: the apparent chaos at the surface disguised a well-crafted architectural beauty underneath. There is no messiness here, only line, circle, individuality, freedom, and a great deal of listening accompanying close observation by each of the dancers as they co-created the work, more or less anew, each night. It was splendid to watch.
For those of us not from Palestine, how can we relate or comment on the tensions and politics, the suffused hostility that counterpoints the unstinting ebullience across the stage? Badke lets us in on the suffering without proselytizing victim culture and, instead, allows us to feel with an intense viscerality of near-total kinesthetic transfer, what it must be like to live through one’s home being destroyed or life thoroughly impeded. Only dance can make another’s whole body feel the powerful emotional memory of such experiences. Badke is not only a how-to model of detailed storytelling power, it is a window into another world we could not otherwise experience via the other arts to quite this depth.
#LUDWIGVAN
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