Dear friend,

You’ve asked me to write. I do so with pleasure and a little hesitation as to the relevance of my response to this vast question: « Does dance bear witness to the upheavals of the contemporary world while at the same time acting in it?

I’d like to be able to say yes and sing the song of the contemporaneity of our art, of the evidence of its acuity, of its provocative role. All that would undoubtedly be true.

Yet something holds me back when I look back and look around.

The feeling, as soon as I manage to remove my blinkers a little, that the shocks of the world, as they say, are of a different power.

It’s true that we are actors in the world and, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, our behaviour undoubtedly influences its progress and contributes to its spinning.

The movements I perceive are more profound and far-reaching than our gestures addressed in vain to the indifference of the stars.

I see the migratory movements of peoples, the clash of power relations, the violent gesture of wars, nations pitted against each other, the sky streaked with intercontinental flights… the fatum of civilisation.

The dance of the world, if you like, whose choreography eludes us and whose gestures crush us.

Dance, in the institutional sense in which it is understood here, is sometimes seen as the spearhead, the tip of a battle that it takes on the task of inflecting.

I don’t really believe that. At least not often.

Exceptionally, but this is the prerogative of all art, it becomes a vision, a premonition of the future.

It overturns certain codes and changes the game.

You hear it, I’m giving you a Norman answer: yes and no. What do we mean by dance?

What do we mean by dance? Is it choreographic production or the dance that bodies dance?

That’s something I’ve discovered over the course of my career, when I’ve given up my stupid claim as a young choreographer to create the first gesture: dance runs in the street, is improvised on the pavement, vibrates on the dance-floor.

It comes from the people, it is of the people before it is put through the cultural mill.

It is there, at its birth, that we can perhaps speak of action and testimony linked to the contemporary world.

I’m talking here about a dance born of a brutal and direct perception of the world. Spontaneous yet elaborate, wild yet refined. Intelligent, very intelligent.

This is the kind of dance that I love and that I watch above all. It has made me realise that my job as a choreographer, even if it aims to organise living things, must first and foremost consist of not getting in the way, of clearing the floor of any superfluous presence or pretence, even if I regularly fail at this.

And when I don’t fail completely, sometimes something really important happens. The body, placed in its rightful place, freed from our poor messages, begins to speak, to bear witness, and it is at that moment that the spectator can feel the full force of a reality which, sometimes condensed into a single gesture, manifests itself, alters us and shakes the world.

A world that, it turns out, does quite well without us.

                                                    Heddy Maalem