A row of multicolored carpets dotted with pink flowers and yellow slippers borders the stage of the Grand Théâtre de Genève. A pleasure to behold, this river of wool, petals and leather constitutes a fragile border between stage and room, fiction and reality. It preserves in its tangled folds landscapes and sensations of a trip to Morocco that only ask to be relived before us between the mint tea ceremony and the sacrifice of the sheep.
This simply sumptuous installation concludes the show. Ihsanecreated on November 13 by the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui for the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève. Along with the 22 performers of the Swiss company that he has directed since 2022, he invited four dancers from his Eastman company, based in Antwerp (Belgium), as well as a live orchestra. Under the direction of the Tunisian composer and viola d’amore Jasser Haj Youssef, the Lebanese singer Fadia Tomb El-Hage and the Moroccan singer Mohammed El Arabi-Serghini, accompanied by a lutenist, a pianist and a percussionist, surround a magical sound membrane the incessant rolling ofIhsan.
The title of this piece designates in Arabic “an ideal of goodness, goodness and benevolence”. It is also, as we learn in the program, the name of a young homosexual of Moroccan origin, beaten to death, at the age of 32, in Liège (Belgium), in 2012. Cherkaoui implicitly mentions his terrible experience. . Since his beginnings in the 2000s, this artist “queer and Arab”as it is defined today, has always claimed its identity. After Vlaemsch (“At home”, in Flemish), first part of a diptych started in 2022 and dedicated to his Flemish mother, the one who grew up between the Bible and the Koran designed Ihsane. He follows in the footsteps of his Moroccan father, a migrant worker in Belgium, who died in 1995. Twenty-eight years later, in 2023, Cherkaoui traveled to Tangier to unsuccessfully find his father’s grave, but he reflected on his grandfather’s.
youthful flavor
the decoration ofIhsane It seems straight out of Tangier or Marrakech. The facade of a building rises and we teleport to the medina. Stone lace and zellige, a traditional mosaic typical of Moroccan architecture, adorn this poetic tomb that is Ihsan. Solar and flaming flight of paintings embedded in each other, metamorphoses according to the sliding of mobile panels and videos. The ensemble scenes come together, letting out the solos and duets to better unite the group in unison. The geometric alignment evaporates into a meandering round; The segmented clarity of the gestures turns into the confusion of a waltz.
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