Drawing with dance

Ali Salmi’s contemporary piece while highlighting the water crisis is about the body in public spaces

FESTIVAL FACTO 2013 LA MERIDIENNNE LUNEVILLE 54 FR

Against the invitingly balmy backdrop of the Bandra seascape, with gulls and gully folk in equal attendance, the maverick French choreographer Ali Salmi held what one might describe as an experiential masterclass at the Carter Road Promenade roughly three weeks ago. It was one in a week-long series put together in collaboration with local dancers from the Terence Lewis Dance Company, as part of an ongoing urban dance project, titled Bodies Landscapes , that has been conceptualised by Osmosis Cie, the dance company Salmi founded in 1993. Since then, as part of a whirlwind global tour that commenced last month with stopovers in New York and Saarbrücken, Salmi has visited a few Indian cities.

Apart from an extended stint in Mumbai, as an architect himself, Salmi was drawn to Chandigarh — a city whose master plan was chalked up by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier — and Pondicherry, where a thriving French sub-culture is still extant. On his group’s Facebook page, images and vignettes of this vibrant subcontinental journey jostle for space with his frequent detours into dance (with an odd Lata Mangeshkar video thrown in). The fetching urbanscapes take us from precarious scaffoldings to high-rises, from candid shots of sleeping bodies to bright and beaming calendar art, from Chandigarh’s great modernist structures to Mumbai’s bleak but compelling skylines.

Salmi’s work is resolutely urban, and motifs such as these might frequently be encountered in them.

Rooted in the urban

This weekend, Salmi is back in Mumbai, and his hosts, the Alliance Française de Bombay (AF Bombay) have organised not one but two events associated with his vaunted conceptual dancework,

Waterfloor — a performance-cum-projection as well as a conference in which Salmi will attempt to briefly trace the history of dance in public spaces, from the iterations of postmodern dance in the U.S. in the 1990s to the works of contemporary dancers in France today, including his own not insubstantial oeuvre. Waterfloor , first performed in 2007, is a contemporary dance experiment which explores the relationship between the body and public spaces whilst highlighting the water crisis. In the piece, Salmi is splayed out across a metal surface, and projections of water in myriad settings — rain clouds and storms, leaking faucets in public toilets, fountains — are part of a synchronously mapped backdrop. This provides the turf for an invigorating dance performance, with the performer’s body and shadow interacting with the projection of his self on a bed of running water (or a flooded ‘waterfloor’).

The piece was part of a choreographic repertoire in which dance and physical theatre becomes the conduit through which one might experience spaces that are out in the open, but might ordinarily be obscured.

The other two works in this series were ‘Al-Hambra Containers’, where ‘bodies in exile’ transported in dumpsters supplied the grist for a powerful dance intervention, and ‘Flesh’, which explores the impulses of a body incarcerated in a truck, to the accompaniment of soaring Arab vocals. These are tales of forced migration, of dislocation and exile.

Born and bred in France, Salmi’s works nonetheless occupy a beguiling cross-cultural niche in which the marginalised voice finds an evocative expression in the body of the performer itself.

Dedicated to art

The events are part of AF Bombay’s ongoing attempts to bring French culture, both traditional and cutting-edge, to an Indian populace eager to sample international fare. The face of France today is multicultural and diverse, but with a polarised political climate that spectacularly mirrors our own, even if its soft power in India might be stunted by the lack of a shared primary tongue unlike, say, the United Kingdom. Through heritage walks, film screenings, puppetry workshops and poetry readings, AF Bombay’s arts wing has been steadily impacting the cultural scene in Mumbai and Osmosis Cie’s Waterfloor - Danse et Espaces Publics is yet another step in that direction.

Waterfloor - Danse et Espaces Publics will take place today at 7 p.m. at St. Andrew’s Centre for Philosophy & Performing Arts, free for all; A conference on Waterfloor - Danse et Espaces Publics will take place at 1 p.m. on September 22 at Theosophy Hall, Churchgate