Dance, Diaspora, And The Myth Of The “Common Maghreb”
Crossing the Line’s “Performing the Collective” Symposium
By Elizabeth Kiefer
Performing the Collective. Photo: Alisa Solomon
Three hours into Performing the Collective, a cultural symposium put on by Crossing the Line Festival on October 7, the choreographer Nacera Belaza redirected the conversation from the communal to the singular. Responding to a question about shared cultural traits among North African francophone nations, she appeared to bristle slightly. “The common Maghreb isn’t really a thing,” said Belaza, whose primary language is French, speaking through an interpreter. Instead, the standout similarities among Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, she suggested, involve an ambivalent relationship with Europe, and particularly France.
The idea that these countries refer culturally not to one another but to a shared former colonizer was a theme that dominated the symposium, which took place over the course of five hours on a Sunday afternoon. Panels featured prominent francophone choreographers who probed topics of equity, diversity, and diaspora in the performance space. The speakers also discussed the value of arts accessibility within their home countries and the role that community building has played in their own artistic practices.
In conversation with Crossing the Line co-curator Simon Dove, choreographer Syhem Belkhodja spoke about giving young Tunisian men an alternative to ISIS through creative movement. Belkhodja, the director of both the School of Arts and Cinema and the Mediterranean Centre for Contemporary Dance, said that, in the years after 9/11, she didn’t understand why young people were becoming radicalized. “It’s as if we elites were always looking north, and we lost track of what was happening in our own country,” she said.
She turned her attention toward Tunisia, tailoring the curriculum of her local dance programs to be more in line with the worldview of Tunisian youth. New students were drawn in by classes like breakdance and other more contemporary styles, she noted, adding, with some alarm, that the increasingly religiously observant men were drawn to breakdancing also because they could perform it without touching women. She expressed hope that creative opportunities like these can be a counterforce to the pull of jihad in Tunisia. “I believe artists and art are the only solution for our country,” she told Dove.
Performing the Collective / Photo: courtesy of FIAF/Crossing the Line
Like Belkhodja, Meryem Jazouli, a Morocco-based dancer and choreographer, decided to build more inroads to art within her own country in the aftermath of Islamic extremism. In 2011, she opened Espace Darja, a dance workspace and residency platform in Casablanca; it closed its doors earlier this year. Paired on a panel with Caribbean born, NYC-based choreographer Paloma McGregor, Jazouli spoke of the importance of creating a dance space where anyone — regardless of background, experience, age, or station — can feel welcome and included. Her aim was to generate both curiosity and a forum for free, safe conversation.
Creating community is central to the mission of McGregor’s work as well. The founder of Angela’s Pulse Performance Projects, her work often draws on the history of the place it is presented in. Last June, her piece “Building a Better Fishtrap” was staged on the Bronx River, in the form of a 1.5 mile boat tour that explored the waterway’s embattled past and present; the process of creating that performance included collaboration with Bronx-based historians, artists, activists, and residents. The goal, she said, was to involve a diverse collection of people.
But while on many levels McGregor met that goal, she also pointed out another challenge that goes beyond who gets to be in the audience. Creating opportunities for people to engage with art first requires space for artists to make art. For people of color working in the experimental realm, said McGregor, finding a place to develop her own practice has at times been hard. In some senses, she said, she feels as though she is still on the outside looking in.
That sense of outsiderness — put another way, “otherness” — was also a subtle refrain in Nacera Belaza’s panel interview. Born in Algeria and raised and educated mainly in France, Belaza said, “A lot of the time, I’m in a kind of no man’s land.” Though the French Cultural Ministry appointed her to its Order of Arts and Letters in 2015, she said that Algeria has been slower to acknowledge the success of Algerians living abroad, herself included. “If you left, you were sort of seen as having ‘given up’,” she explained. At the same time, she resists any cultural label, saying she is neither an Algerian artist, a French artist, or an Algerian-French artist.
But Belaza has not given up on Algeria any more than Belkhodja has on Tunisia, Jazouli on Morocco, or McGregor on St. Croix or the Bronx. Toward the end of the symposium, Belaza and Jazouli shared a quick, unscheduled exchange that culminated in a question: How could North African choreographers create opportunities to work in their own countries, instead of defaulting to Europe? The “common maghreb” may not exist. The panelists shared, however, a common desire to develop dance in the diverse communities each calls home.
