With its attention turned towards experimental and innovative works of performing arts, Atalante offers a space for the artistic works, a discourse surrounding those works, and the field at large. During the fall of 2024 we will delve deeper into the various universes of the artists presenting work and make space for a dialogue between the artists, the spectators and the venue.
Presented below is a reflective text by Josephine Gray based on a discussion with Eddie Yalman and Julian ”Joujou” Namroud from ID Crew, in connection with their performance of Stranger X Stranger at Atalante in December 2024.
The constant stream of quotes and phrases disguised as truths is a curious phenomenon our current culture revels in. This predilection of ours has unfortunately led to the banalisation of many human activities that deserve our attention and care. In the context of dance, examples abound. Think only of the (mis)quote from Beckett: “dance first, think later. It’s the natural order”. A so-called “quote” constructed from a few lines of Estragon, Vladimir and Pozzo’s dialogue in Waiting for Godot. Ironically, its meaning within the play is contrary to the laissez-faire attitude the misquote leads us to believe. Indeed, within the play it begs the question of what the natural order actually is and that dancing is the activity of clowns, fools and vagabonds. I would dare to wager that being a dancing vagabond is not the image the shorthand quotation seeks to inspire. Another example would be from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra where quotes such as “let each day be a loss to us in which we did not dance once” and “I would believe only in a god who could dance” have been extracted. Isolated from the context in which they were written they are only able to offer us a vain inspiration at its best, a sugarcoated cliché at its worst. What they hold from us is the intricate workings that are part and parcel of, in this case, the allegorical nature of the book viewed through the medium of the hermitic sage Zarathustra. The ideas hidden within those short lines raises the question of dancing as a communion with oneself and its relation to the possibility of a divine knowledge. But these ideas are difficult to gauge from extracted sentences.
I raise these observations because they are examples of how easily we dismiss contexts and origins of ideas that permeate and inform our societies. It is also something I am reminded of in conversation with Eddie Yalman and Julian Namroud on their current piece “Stranger x Stranger”. Our contemporary remoulding of the ancient archetypal stranger has produced a character defined by the xenophobe. The particular hate towards the xenos (stranger) has always accompanied the archetype of the stranger, but it has not always been the only quality attached to it. We cannot forget that the stranger (xenos) is intimately tied to hospitality (xenia), as the Ancient Greeks reminds us. The stranger was once also the disguised divinity offering grace to the hosts house. The stranger was thus bound to a reciprocal hospitality, not rejection or exile. The universality of feeling estranged should be able to accommodate the complexity residing within the archetype of the stranger. The shared experience of being a stranger has also been the impetus for Eddie and Julian’s new work. During lockdown they came to the uncanny realisation that although having been friends for over fifteen years they remained strangers to one another. This in turn seems to have opened a floodgate of other questions pertaining to the correlation between kinship and stranger-hood.
Eddie smiles at the thought of how many times he has been made to feel a stranger in the dance community as well as in society at large. Describing how he was thrown into the dancing circles at various family gatherings growing up he says that he “never wanted to dance again”. Instead his mind was set on pursuing any kind of reclusive activity where he wouldn’t need to interact directly with other people. Yet in spite of his shyness and physical resistance towards dance on other peoples terms, an internal sense that movement was essential to his life remained present. This eventually led him to study various styles of dance from hiphop and house to contemporary dance styles. But the sense of stranger-hood remained, especially towards the preconceived ideas of what dance should be. He tells of how he had to stop dancing in cyphers and battles because of others insistence upon him “not dancing hiphop”. As if his internal movement would not fit into any category and therefore could not be accommodated. After having come to terms with that dancing would only be possible on his own terms he reflects on the fact that “dance helped me to be able to talk, I’m able to speak through dance”. If he found the need for categorisation present within the dance community it naturally extended to society at large. Moving through a Scandinavian society with a Middle Eastern heritage entails the daily facing of prejudices and preconceived ideas. Eddie says that because of other peoples reluctance of seeing him simply as he is, he has conceded in helping other along the way by offering some kind of identification. He says that “I tell people that I’m Buddhist”, and in doing so he is able to make other people feel less nervous about his position in the world. We are reminded that in todays society being seen as strange – in any shape or form – is inherently a threat. This is not a rare phenomenon in todays society. The need to address and soothe the insecurities of others by offering a token of “safety” through changing ones name, appearance and beliefs to ones that are familiar within any given context points towards the ignorance and indifference that any shorthand answer seeks to provide.
The perspective and experiences of Julian are seemingly opposite to that of Eddie at first glance. Thrown into the various dancing circles at home and at family gatherings Julian thrived and has danced for as long as he can remember. The dances that were performed in the living room, and at the weddings he attended, were nonetheless never regarded as forms of dance he could pursue outside of the social gatherings in which they took place. Mainly because of their closed cultural context. Other options, such as urban dance styles, were instead presented to him as a more viable option to practice outside of the familial context. As a young adolescent growing up in Sweden this might have seemed inconsequential. Yet the familial and the cultural is never an idea. It is a lived reality which cannot be viewed as disembodied. In other words, the apparent separation between for example family and self, or citizen and state, is nonsensical in its lived manifestation. In the world of thought and analysis we are keen to discuss our supposed positions in the world as entities outside of ourselves, but experientially we live them. Hence, the cultural strangeness posed by the likes of hiphop dancing raised alarm, especially with Julian’s father, who questioned the legitimacy of practicing a dance originating from, in this case, Afro-Americans. As a boy from a Middle Eastern heritage he had his “own” dances, why would he pursue those of other creeds and not his own? Today he acknowledges that although he devoted many years to learn and gain a fuller appreciation about the history and rhythms of styles of dance within the urban dance community he eventually felt that those other dances, such as the Assyrian, Chaldean and Iraqi traditions, should be integrated into a dance that came from him. Realising that the categorisation and exclusion of dances were nonsensical, a new field of movement opened up whence space was made possible for a fuller human being to be present in the dance.
Considerations such as these and their insistence upon remaining “honest, transparent and vulnerable towards each other”, as Eddie and Julian emphasises, laid the foundations upon which this piece could find its existence. Their combined experiences of the multiplicity present in the same cultural heritage has enabled them to look at the “stranger” both in familiar and unfamiliar settings. Raised as Muslim and Orthodox Christian respectively, choosing to assimilate the influences of hiphop music and dance(s), growing up in a small Swedish city. These are but a few denominators that have been discussed and reflected by the pair as a way to find an expression that can address the contradictions we hold of ourselves and society at large. Julian says that “it’s not just me dancing, family and friends are around me on stage from the past and future”, while Eddie says that “I just feel vibration, I try to put it in form”. The language that is proposed by dance is universal because it relates to that which all human beings inhabit: the body. When Julian says that “I can communicate with myself and others”, it is the moving body that is the medium of that communication. In the case of “Stranger x Stranger”, Eddie and Julian keep exploring what the piece is, and can be. The question that keeps guiding them, and the question they also ask the audiences continue to be “are we friends or are we still strangers?”
In the post-modern age the notion of dance as a stage practice implicitly means a Western understanding of “modern dance”. This kind of “modern dance” can in its essence be described as a turning-away-from the formal constraints of ballet. The binary relation between ballet and modern dance is however, to say the least, reductive. Dancing has been part of the theatrical canon since its inception. Indeed, at the inception dance was performed in the circle and semicircle much like the majority of “traditional” and “urban” dances around the globe. In todays dance world many dancers and choreographers would happily turn away from the systematic division of “genres”. A step remains a step, a rhythm remains a rhythm. The histories of those steps and rhythms are indispensable knowledges in order for the dancer to place themselves within a continual tradition of dancing. The dancing itself, however, transgresses boundaries of creed, religion and ethnicity. The challenge to place dance within a specific artistic universe is, more importantly, a challenge that all dance-artists faces.
The questions of the natural order, of dance and how it relates to a divine order have been pondered upon by thinkers throughout the ages. The two examples of misunderstood (mis)quotations that I briefly discussed at the beginning of this text were proposed by thinkers who themselves experienced life as strangers to the societies and surroundings they had been born into. The irony that their works have been disseminated as banal clichés is an irony we should treat with caution. That which we do not take proper care of has a habit of falling into hands that seek to distort the integrity of its original form. As has been the case with our contemporary notion of the (threatening) stranger. To examine the sense of stranger-hood requires that we reflect upon our personal as well as societal conditionings. Dance, in its primal state as communicator, offers the possibility of gaining knowledge not only about ourselves but also of those we dance with. The banality that shorthand quotes and phrases may attract in their glimmering speed leaves a bitter aftertaste having affected no transformation. If we are to take seriously the possibility of dance as an artistic language beyond genres we need to look beyond them in order to find that the communality of the human body surpasses a system of classification. This goes hand in hand with rejecting the categorical imperative of the binary as the only method of knowledge. It is simply not true that we are either known or strangers, we can be both at the same time.
Reflektion & text: Josephine Gray