CAVALIER SEUL OR TO GO YOUR OWN WAY
As far as I can remember, I have felt my solitude to be a destination, or a destiny.
How, through the meanderings of the future, have I somehow ended up becoming a choreographer? Why have I fought to create dances? Where have I found the strength to create them, and then the courage to show them to others? I, who is repulsed by all exhibition, who is so sarcastic and dubious before the media’s lewdness?
I sometimes wonder whether it would not be better to turn the page in silence. Leaving the tenacious murmur of my life to lose itself in the general hubbub.
Instead of involving myself with a world that I have always preferred watching.
I love to contemplate.
I know how to be patient.
A woman’s beauty infuses like tea. A dance movement is the moment resulting from waiting patiently.
One must wait a long time before a pure impetus emanates from the heart’s complexity.
My choreographies are my lively children, always changing and then leaving me. Disappearing with time, and of whom no image could ever restore their initial vitality.
I want to try and say what their origins are.
I trust my films will help me understand this, and to explain it to those who would wish to see it.
My family, my friends, my people… For this moment of posterity that I have imagined, they will feel, for one reason or another, empathy for my work and my way of seeing things.
I would like the elaboration process of my images to be as simple and necessary as a wing in a flock of starlings.
I would be not be telling the whole truth if I only enumerated a logical succession of sequence of events and it would be incredibly boring.
For a precise vision to come to life, one must plan organize and learn to let go.
There is nothing more unwelcomed than the hand of a bird-catcher organizing the tyranny of the cage. The skillful creation of a door leading into the unknown: such is my plan.
I want to talk about what I love and what defines me. This will create the outline of a portrait, which is my own, of every man standing still, motionless before the world, observing its gyration.
I was a child during the Algerian war. A man was running, hunted, along the small ravine at the back of our house. It was not the detonation that I remember, but the elegance with which he slowly fell down the steep slope.
«Un coup de grâce ».
I found this violence again later, in the ring.
There, I tried to tame my fear, and learned the origin and mastery of energy. Throughout this long apprenticeship, I encountered -unexpectedly- the feeling of beauty, of the equal distribution of forces, born in the heart of violent confrontation, a sort of cosmic harmony.
I was born in Algeria. Algerian father. French mother. An agonizing struggle.
I have kept from it this strange sensation of being a stranger to everything. This difficulty in belonging. This taste for the foreign. This true curiosity of “the other” and the inclination to go toward it.
From what had been a tragedy, I made a strength.
At the core of my work is otherness. I have extensively travelled. Explored almost the entire globe. Worked with dancers of diverse origins.
I love the foreign. Africa, Asia, America. The men and the women. The sceneries and the cities.
“L’ailleurs”.
The world’s movement.
Its nature.
The soul of the horses that have been, for many long years, a part of my daily life and teach me in silence the unfathomable nature of time and life.
The wear and tear of my body that has fought for a longtime.
Women, their miraculous blend of strength and delicate intelligence.
The dancing bodies.
When it comes to say that those are my images, I find myself as helpless as when I have to describe an upcoming choreography.
It is impossible. It is something that lies within me and which, with unwavering confidence, I am sure of being able to extract and wear one day.
Those images will be an account, and perhaps will explain the origins of the creative force that moves me.
I wish for them to mimic the improbable, precise and gracious imprints of my horse’s hooves in the dust.
These tracks mean nothing, the wind erases them. However, for those who know how to look, they are a language. They are a message left on the path by a “Cavalier seul”, for all to see.
Heddy Maalem,