Scars of pain and joy
Amidst the hum of morning chatter in the coffee shop of Delhi's Park Hotel, the tall figure of Joseph Nadj reclining in a chair, cigarette in mouth, seems a far cry from the electric mover of the evening before at the Shri Ram Centre Auditorium, when he and his dance partner Cecile Thieblemont had the audience chewing their nails on the edge of their seats for an hour with the riveting performance of Le Temps Du Repli (the Time of Withdrawal or looking back).
Man/woman relationships, the very stuff of Creation, in its strange alchemy of attraction and withdrawal, of dominance and subjugation, of agony and ecstasy, of the mundane and the exotic, of the gentle and the harsh is ever a puzzle - an indecipherable mystery of polarities.
And catching the nature of this coming together in one of the most intense and enthralling dance dialogues is the choreography of Joseph Nadj who visualized this production over a period of time, its subtly evocative percussive music created by Vladimir Tarasov, topping the work with that final touch of piquant seasoning.
Looking back over a relationship, exploring its abysses and peaks through the language of dance makes even the most familiar assume a strange paradox of corporeally demanding and never ending surprises in the body to body dialogue, ever on the edge of a precipice, the slightest hint of a missed step or timing capable of ruining the impact of charged energy and even causing grievous bodily hurt.
Stunning as the jumping, rolling, clawing and body-balancing-body movements were in technique, they were also emotionally charged.
No judgements
"Do you feel there is a great deal of pain and even violence in man/woman relationships?"
"I make no judgement - good or bad. I merely try to image the visceral intensity of the encounter over a period of time - viewed retrospectively."
Drawn like the moth to the flame even when synched, the throbbing dance carried those ever-alive and never-relenting attempts at constant re-connections. High voltage movement convulsions, when counter-pointed against unusual freezes, create stark impact.
The non-movement of two figures of a man and woman, seated on chairs face down, head covered in hats, held in stillness of time for over 15 minutes, at the start of the production was a yogic, meditative exercise - a harnessing of physical, mental energies before erupting into movement.
"It is a concentration - a going inwards," Joseph agrees. Those sculptured images of silence emerge from the aesthetic perceptions of a dancer/sculptor, Joseph's own first exhibition Installations, sculpted round the notion of time, having been mounted in 1996 at the Carre-Saint-Vincent-Scene Nationale of Orleans.
During the dance, hiding behind a drawing board, the hand insouciantly drawing lines of a `maison' with man and woman, testify to the skills of one whose "Miniatres" was exhibited in Douai in 2000.
"Would you agree that there is something like a French aesthetic and if so how would you describe it?"
"Not really." My Modern Dance has influences from Germany, Japan and the United States - countries where I trained and worked.
A self-taught singer and accordionist (both performed to evoke excruciatingly nostalgic moments in Le Temps du Repli), Cecile Thieblemont dances with a gut involvement, moving as gracefully and purposefully as she emotes. There is a strong sense of theatre in every move. The music by Vladimir Tarasov, which in this case follows rather than dictates movement, echoing every stop and frenetic thrust with uncanny togetherness, makes the third side to this artistic triangle. "Having worked closely, we are acutely sensitive to each other's aesthetic perceptions," says Joseph. A danced encounter where the visit of the stork also features, where memories flash by and get blurred, takes the form of a series of suggestions rather than statements - an experience of life lived at its most intense.
Unarguably, Le Temps Du Repli is one of the finest Modern Dance creations to be seen in recent years in the Capital.
LEELA VENKATARAMAN
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