Nehad Selaiha finds arresting images at the 4th Festival of Dance Theatre In an O Henry award-winning short story called To Be, American writer Barbara Grizoni Harrison came up with the startling expression: "I love my daughter's flesh." At first, it sounded to me utterly reductive and, indeed, repulsive. But, gradually, on reflection, I came to see the simple wisdom of this unusual pronouncement. Though we may not want to admit it, particularly in an anti-body culture like ours, the simple truth is that whatever we may imagine we know about anybody, even our own children, is transmitted to us through that weak, finite, ephemeral thing we call "human flesh". For years I have been bothered by modern dance. It seemed to me it had explored all the possible twists and contortions of the human body and was growing tediously repetitive. After all, how many movements can the human limbs perform; you can fling your arms and legs in such and such direction, bend, sway, jump, roll and crouch in humanly possible ways but then there is an end to all convolutions. If one is brought up to regard the body as a mere dispensable vehicle, a paltry concoction of water and dust, then modern dance, with its revelling glorification of that finite vessel, becomes an essential need. Regardless of whatever message or meaning you may glean from such performances, what really matters and is of staying value is this celebration of pure physicality. The trouble with modern dance, however, is that it comes packaged in thick wrappings of fulsome praise and weird, esoteric hype which seems intent on disguising its simple truth, that is, its inherent physicality. It is as if you could not sell a modern dance show unless you clothed it in obfuscating linguistic robes and invested it with spiritual, philosophical or mystical intent. I think life would be much easier if we stopped looking for deeper meanings in dance shows and accepted them for what they essentially are -- celebrations of the glory of the flesh. Such musings proved liberating in my case. I went to see Norway's Pli A Pli not to look for Ingun Bjornsgaard's "athematic concentration on the tension between the private and the universal", as the publicity excerpt printed in the festival's catalogue says, but simply to enjoy that vital reassurance of the dignity and great plastic potential of the human body. I got what I wanted and loved the carefree, unaffected and humorous grace of her dancers, their suppleness and exquisite contours; and for an added bonus, Bjornsgaard gave me a few graphic images to take home with me. Apart from the thoroughly exhausted body-to-body interaction, which in this case was exuberant, deliciously ironical and openly theatrical (indeed, the whole show came across as a dress rehearsal behind the scenes), there was an inventive exploration of body-to- object interaction. The dancer with the length of shiny fabric at the beginning seemed to carve a route back to a pre-linguistic stage, when we gave to objects the same dignity and importance as ourselves -- treated them as autonomous entities with a will of their own. The wilful, recalcitrant bit of cloth kept eluding any definitive identity-label as the skilful dancer handled it, or, rather, interacted with it, becoming a dress, a shroud and a death sheet before suddenly disappearing. Of course, you can invest this seemingly simple, childish sequence with as many cultural connotations as you like; but the delightful fact remains, and this is one of the show's triumphs, that the materiality of the cloth and the semi-nude body dealing with it were never allowed to be forgotten. If you ask me what Pli A Pli was all about, I will tell you simply that it was about bodies, what we choose to clothe them in and how this affects our movements, postures, physical responses and inner emotions. This is perhaps what made the final sequence, where one of the dancers methodically steals the jewellery, shoes, shawls and even petticoats of the elegantly dressed, seemingly dead women slumped on a chair, limply leaning against a wall, or lying prostrate on the floor, so riveting. Significantly, what ends the show is the flick of a fan. The wisdom of ignoring any verbal description or elucidation of a dance show was no more apparent than in Mohamed Shafiq's I Tell You. It is reportedly based on or inspired by Salah Abdel- Sabour's second collection of poetry which bears this name. If you were to be as foolish as I was and go back to the poetry to try to decipher the implications of the physical formations on stage you would only meet with frustration and utter bewilderment. The show I saw was powerful and delightful, in itself, and did not need Abdel-Sabour's name for legitimisation. What really inspired Shafiq was not that collection of poetry -- definitely not the best of Abdel-Sabour's -- but the legend that has formed round the poet since his death. I may even go so far as to assert that neither Shafiq nor any of his dancers has read this collection. And may be it is good they didn't. I Tell You was written long before Abdel-Sabour's incipient sense of political disillusionment ripened into existential despair. As such it could not have inspired the series of violent, sardonic images that make up Shafiq's production. In none of the seven poems that make up the collection do we find the image of that lugubrious bride with the bunch of flowers who haunts the stage with her white satin gown and flirts with which ever leader manages to gain temporary supremacy in the musical-chairs power game. Nowhere in the poems can you get the slightest intimation of that riveting, terrifying image of this travesty of a bride running a microphone down the bodies of the dancers like an electronic detector, or the three dancers, each holding a microphone in his mouth, and breathing eerily into it as they jump up and down, on all fours, like monkeys. If you forget about Abdel-Sabour, and surrender to the sensuous reality of the imagery, you will know in your guts, not through the head, what Shafiq wanted to communicate non-verbally: the eternal game of political musical chairs; the eternally postponed hopes; the failing attempts at ablution and purification; the abominable degradation of humanity under dictatorship; the pernicious power of the media; the lethal effects of hero worship; down to the stark impossibility of simply washing, ironing one's shirt and keeping it clean. Such meanings, and of course this is only one reading of the show, are born not out of any simple, mimetic rendering of the poetry into visual, kinetic terms, but out of the interaction of bodies and objects -- water, table, chairs, ironing board, artificial flowers and microphones. At the end of the show, you feel you love those objects as much as the agonised human bodies writhing around them; and however depressing the reading you arrive at there is that little bit of comfort to be drawn from the material, uncaring solidity of objects and the stormy, physical vitality that brings them to life. Shafiq's I Tell You may bear no relation whatsoever to the collection of poetry from which it borrows a name; still, it represents a sensitive metaphoric approach to the world of Abdel-Sabour in its poetic totality and ranks among the best and most profound tributes paid to this poet. The same paradox of extreme dejection of outlook and infectious vitality and physical zest characterises Karim El-Tonsi's To Whom It May Concern. Here, images of air crashes, gas masks, atomic bombs and utter devastation alternate with the grace and beauty of Japanese tapestries and kimonos and the unbridled sensuality of oriental dancing. At the centre is a big ball -- like a beach ball -- and as the dancers roll over and around it, amid clouds of smoke, it builds into an image of our topsy-turvy globe. But by far the most poignant image in the show is that of the crippled ballet dancer who, defying her maimed leg, encased in a stiff, long boot, insists on carrying on with the dance. El- Tonsi's vision, despite its bleakness, is ultimately one of a brave new world where the sheer energy of the human body, its pulsating, throbbing vitality is irrepressible. +Judging+by+the+three+shows+we+have+seen+of+the+festival+so+far,+one+may+hazard+a+conjecture:+that+with+all+the+human+flesh+laid+to+waste+every+day+and+coldly+reported+in+the+news,+this+event+seems+intended+as+a+valorisation+of+the+human+body+and+all+the+objects+that+surround+it.+When+all+else+fails,+perhaps+it+is+in+objects+and+the+warmth+of+human+flesh+that+we+may+seek+comfort.
