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ARTS:
FRENCH BIENNALES
Mecca
For Dance
Underscoring
the political dialectic between the metropolitan and the provincial, the
cool and cocky Thierry Prat (one of the two Thierrys who curate the visual
arts biennale together), chuckles, "We have made the biennale of
Paris very passé indeed." Guy Darmet, the artistic director
of the dance biennale, is more prudent. "Under President Mitterrand,
Jacques Lang, as the minister for culture, decided to decentralise and
devolve cultural patronage to the regions and it was thus that we had
our first biennale of dance in 1981," he tells you. Even if the festival
at Lyon is not quite a la Avignon or Edinburgh in size and reputation,
over the years it has become a Mecca for dance as it is one of the very
few international festivals devoted solely to that art form. Spread over
a month-between early September and the first week of October-the Biennale
de la Danse this year drew over 33 dance companies, 800 odd dancers, choreographers
and musicians and 79,000 spectators (71,531 tickets sold) ensuring 90
per cent attendance in the 19 venues. There were 249 journalists (including
96 from 26 foreign countries) and 19 TV channels (regional, national and
international), with the national and local press running stories on the
front pages. Le Monde ran a special supplement and The New York
Times sent Anna Kisselgoff down for a week to report on it. The statistics
of the art biennale too are no less impressive.
Lyon may
be provincial but it was always prosperous and its people proud of their
past. Guy Darmet, a Lyonnaise himself, has, along with regional and federal
government agencies, managed to do something quite extraordinary. He has,
through his thematically crafted dance biennales, provided that vital
spark needed to re-ignite the interest of an old traditional French region
towards a highly multi-cultural attitude to dance and the whole world.
Over the years, through these festivals, the Lyonnaise have got a taste
of not only dances from a large part of the globe per se, but also the
socio-cultural signifiers that they carry with them. "People of Lyon
like these geographical themes we have devised for our festivals,"
informs Darmet, whose other job is to run the Maison de la Danse, a highly
active multi-functional institution involved in public education, publications,
exhibitions, commissioning new works by choreographers, etc. Darmet's
dance biennales have focused on French, German, African, American, Latin
American and now Asian-European dancing ranging from the ethnological
and the art-dance traditions to the modern and the contemporary.
This year's
theme was Les Routes De La Soi-the silk routes. It gave Darmet
a broad sweep of canvas, imaginatively connecting dances from along the
silk route with Lyon's silk industry. It also led to a tantalising cross-cultural
interface-even if brief and fleeting-among dancers and lovers of dance
from these regions.
So how does
the fabled Orient look from quaint Lyon at the beginning of the 21st Christian
century? "India seems so mystical and mysterious," says Shizuka
Yasuda, a Japanese dance historian who studied in Paris but now lives
in Tokyo. Well, to my Indian eyes, Shanghai appeared bathed in a rainbow
sheen of Hollywood of the Ben Hur era. A resplendent spectacle
on a 150 ft stage on three levels, the 70 dancer-strong Shanghai Song
and Dance Opera was aided by over 200 lights, all kinds of gizmos and
theatrical effects. The result is an amazingly engaging kitsch which by
its sheer scale and magnificence manages to suppress all sense of history
or aesthetics in a gilded make-believe world.
Another presentation that attempted this sort of telescopic vision was
the Dutch Het Internationaal Danstheater which had its all-Dutch company
present music, songs and dances selected from across the Balkans and stretching
to Korea with an Urdu qawwali and a Kathak number thrown in as well. While
such efforts are both popular and educative in their eclectic adoption
of regions and cultures, one would wonder if the West, even in its post-modernist
phase, was not re-enforcing stereotypes of its own making. And if China
was not lending itself to playing the pot-bellied laughing Buddha in a
gloriously naive menagerie. In sharp contrast there were individual contemporary
voices from Asia too. They came from dancers/companies like Daniel Yeung
of Hong Kong, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Dance Theatre ON from
South Korea. A more evolved and serious approach towards cross-cultural
expression informs Jean-Claude Gallotta's work Les Larmes de Marco
Polo (The Tears of Marco Polo). Gallotta has been working with Japanese
dancers for some years now and has a studio in Japan as well.
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