Walking a tightrope

Grace and danger on stage in the form of Accrorap

Six dancers from the French Accrorap company performed in the Bishop's College Auditorium in Colombo on a Monday evening - four men and two women. The mix of personalities and experience that were brought together in this ensemble created an exceptional evening of dance.

Accrorap uses a choreography informed by the angular movement and acrobatics of hip-hop and break dance, and the symmetry and discipline of the classical forms.

The six members of the company exploited these contrasting traditions to bring grace and danger to their performances - the essence of the dance. This fusing of traditions, along with the music the company uses (an electronic soundtrack prepared by Philipe Jacquot) - hip-hop and rap rhythms; music with North African and West African resonances; echoes of classical orchestration amplified to levels of extreme volume challenges the dancers to give performances of breathtaking physicality. It also challenges the audience to question the canons of movement and sound we associate with serious dance.

That evening, the Alliance Francaise and the Cultural Section of the French Embassy in Colombo not only gave us the chance to see the work of this exciting ensemble. Imaginatively, they also invited a young Sri Lankan rap group, "Brown Boogie Nation", as a curtain raiser.

If one of the themes of the evening was dialogue, then this has to have been a positive move as it will have given these local performers an example of how it is possible to use a foreign musical form as a framework for a creative expression that is grounded in the local.

Accrorap has taken a black American form and extended it by drawing on the richness of francophone cultures in Europe and Africa. This is surely a direction that rap performers in Sri Lanka might wish to consider - including the group we heard that evening. A rap which connects with the issues which affect the youth of Colombo or Jaffna will have greater authenticity and interest than a performance which solely depends on the imitation of the postures, street clothes and street language of North American models.

From the beginning of Accrorap's set, the six performers, all dressed in sexually neutral baggy black and grey, dominated the stage and convinced those of us who had feared that the performance was going to be just more MTV that we were wrong. The packed audience was delighted with what they saw and heard. Here was elegantly choreographed, tightly disciplined, and wonderfully spontaneous dance in which potential contradictions of gender, race and physical strength could be reconciled through the unifying force of the music and a common delight in physical expertise.

Accrorap's performance was divided into six main sequences. Their first piece gave us an immediate sense of what the rest of the evening held in store, and an insight into the company's extraordinary range, especially their capacity to exploit the floor. Each of the pieces that followed had its own character. One matched voices from the desert against an evocative language of gesture, bodies barely moving, hands and faces building a system of signs like a language of the deaf. In another, four dancers moved in isolation, each in her or his own space until a unifying electronic dance rhythm enabled the ensemble to come together.

The central moment of the evening - or at least, the one that I shall remember most vividly... was also the most dangerous. Imagine a red rope running diagonally across the stage. The rope is picked out by an intense beam of red light. On one side there are three dancers - two men, one woman. They are balanced by two men, one woman on the opposite side of the rope. The image is immediately clear. It is Auschwitz. It is the Gulag. It is the camps in Bosnia. It is anywhere where arbitrary authority can place a barrier between people.

The danger was that Accrorap would lapse into cliche, represent too easily the agony of those caught on the wire, offer too easily the violence of those with power, the vulnerability of those without. The great strength of their performance is that they did not do this. Instead, they showed that the rope was a barrier, and a resource. Being dancers, they danced with the rope. No simple messages were attempted. There was only the dance, and we loved it.

And this was the case for the rest of the evening as by now we were convinced. We watched and we applauded. We applauded their skill, their stamina and their commitment. We applauded one dancer as he spun on his head, arms and legs drawing in as he reduced to a rotating, inverted human ball. We applauded another who appeared to take energy from the stage as he created a twisting, rolling human geometry that changed shape with breathtaking speed. We applauded the ensemble's ability to be so solid and so light. In the same way as we take delight in the reciprocal improvisation of a jazz ensemble, or a duo of sitar and tabla, we delighted in the dancers' virtuoso displays of joyous vigour and prowess.

Many of us who came to the Bishop's College Auditorium that evening probably got more than we had bargained for. I for one had gone along with a sense of trepidation. I do not particularly enjoy what is generally called rap music, largely because I do not like the aggressive, macho language and posturing that are so often part of the rap I have seen on music television and heard on the streets. I think that those of us in the audience who were not sure about Accrorap left the theatre well pleased with the experience. I hope that the young people who had come with, perhaps, different expectations were not disappointed. I do not think they were, for what we were given in Bishop's College was a stunning display of modern dance, and they roared their approval along with the rest of us.

-Christopher Tribble

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