© Patrick Fabre Heddy Maalem 'Sacre du Printemps' reviews 'Sacre du Printemps' reviews 'Rite of Spring' reviews recent Heddy Maalem reviews more Rachel Straus reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

While the Ukrainian-born Nijinsky—who choreographed the first Sacre about a tribe of primitive Slavs sacrificing one maiden—made a narrative dance about his ancestors, this Algerian-born artist’s decision to make his Sacre on dancers from West Africa smells like old-fashioned exoticism. The dancers in Maalem's Sacre are nonetheless riveting. On June 12 at the Joyce Theater, they genuinely dedicated themselves to Maalem’s primitive interpretation of Stravinsky’s multi-rhythmic score and to making something of his reductive movement vocabulary (their extensive work in African dance traditions as enumerated in their biographies were not incorporated to any effect). Through their precision athleticism these dancers saved the work from feeling obscene.

Last week Maalem kicked off his U.S. tour at South Carolina’s Spoleto Festival. In various publications, Maalem is quoted as saying that his Sacre—which has been performed more than 100 times in Europe—was inspired by a visit to Lagos (whose population following the 1970s oil boom exploded and now figures between 12 to 18 million people). Last year Maalem was quoted in Territory, the Moscow dance festival website, as saying that at the dawn of this century when he was in Lagos, he heard Stravinsky’s composition—made at the dawn of last century—in his head. Last week in the Charleston City Paper, Maalem added, “Lagos made me think of the end of the world.” Ah, another millennial project about the apocalypse.

Begun in 2000, Sacre is the final installment of Maalem’s African-themed dance trilogy. The work occurs inside a three-sided white box, which is created by walling off the theater’s wings (the Playbill didn’t list a designer). The dance begins with Benoît Dervaux’s projected images of palm fronds and Benoît De Clerck’s soundtrack of thunder and rain. In darkness two dancers move from bent to an erect position, portraying a dawn-of-man tableau. When Stravinsky’s music begins, the cast appears at the back of the stage, standing in a line and then moving forward. They walk tentatively, as though newly arrived to the earth in their tropical-colored underwear by Agathe Laemmel. As the dance progresses, however, any reference to their relationship to an environment—a jungle, a city or Mars—evaporates. Instead, inside the white-walled set the dancers hurl imaginary rocks, enact a sensual orgy, run in place in propulsive unison, and freeze like statues. How this action exemplifies the troubled city that inspired this dance I have no idea.

But in two segments that include Dervaux’s urban images, such as a speeding bus on an elevated highway, and De Clerck’s painful-to-the ears soundtrack of relentless jack hammering, the dance is given an environment: The city as hell. Because Maalem said Stravinsky’s composition came to him when he was in the teeming city of Lagos, the fact that he doesn’t use the music in these scenes strikes me as odd.

In the city sections Maalem focuses on individuals. In the first, a female lies on the floor alone. She lifts her pelvis and shifts her body so that her solid, fleshy legs open to the audience. Because this soloist’s name wasn’t listed in the program, Maalem’s anatomical treatment of her is made all the more troubling. In another solo section, a male (name unknown) lifts his abdominal wall so high that he looks like a starving old man. Then his full-body shaking brought something specific to mind: Electric shock torture. And so ends Maalem’s Sacre.

But before this finale, a woman is “raped” from behind while the tribe looks on. Being part of a tribe (if you identify with the violated woman) or being left alone in the city (if you identify with the man) are both tortuous. Unlike Nijinsky’s Sacre, where a person is sacrificed to the gods so that the community can have a bountiful harvest, in Maalem’s work no redemption exists for anyone.

Clearly Maalem knows that by using Sacre du Printemps and by choreographing on black-skinned dancers he invites questions like: Why does the choreographer set his apocalypse in Nigeria? Why not his home country, France or his native land Algeria? Why does he reinforce age-old stereotypes of black dancers as symbols of savage beauty? Clearly he knows that those of us who are thinking deeply about his choreographic choices can’t help but consider his ideas philosophically disturbing, regardless of his dancers strengths and their devotion to his work.