He twirls his brush in the dark water of the ink stone. Concentrated. As one with everything. A huge white sheet covers the entire length of the large workbench.
He begins. Not a shadow of hesitation. The characters form rapidly without him retracing their outline. The deep black ink stains the sheet from top to bottom and from right to left. It goes fast and it is very beautiful.
I observe the fluid, delicate yet firm contact of the brush tip with the sheet.
He only pauses to briskly twirl the dried brush in the ink bath.
With his elbow at a right angle, his free hand firmly pressed against the wood of the table, his whole body leaning over the work, he writes.
What could be more beautiful, I think to myself.
Of course, the meaning escapes me. I have postponed learning Chinese and even more, its characters, to another life.
But it doesn’t matter, I contemplate the beauty and meditate on the dance of the brush. There is no repentance. Like in dance, something is written without the possibility of return. The body pierces the space, inscribing, or not, a gesture of speech. The calligrapher also traces an irreversible saying in the unspoiled space of the paper.
It’s all about the manner, the style.
According to Master SHEN Zuo Chang, the essence lies in the contact between the fine tip of the ink and the whiteness where it lands. That’s where, he says, everything is decided.
This persistent feeling of a slipping time, which has been inhabiting me recently, comes to mind. I follow with my eyes the intricate slide of the ink on the snow of the page. Time rushes down like a drunken skier, I tell myself, but in doing so, it inscribes in the white of the slope, like the irremediable enigma of every life.
What does he write, the one who traces the signs? Certainly, nothing base. I see that in the end, that’s not what’s important. It’s the act of writing that matters and organizes the world by drawing all the vital energy from this elderly man, full of resolute strength and whose eyes sometimes gleam with gentle irony.
I came to film him. He immediately understood and accepted my approach. It is evident to him that dance and calligraphy (I almost wrote choreography) are linked. All arts brought to their peak are.
It’s this peak that he aimed for all his life and reached, this short, robust man, honest and curious about the person that I am.
Where would I like to film?
In a place where he feels good.
But right here, he says, spreading his arms, in this small shop located in the Song XianQiao district in Chengdu, Sichuan province.
Alas, not enough light!
Then, in two days, at GuangHan where my museum, the BiLei House of Books, is located.
The place will do.
You want to film like Picasso, through a glass?
He refers to Henri Georges Clouzot’s “The Mystery of Picasso”.
Rather, in the void and without a brush if you agree.
He laughs.
Here I am at work. I was able to film the master at work and understand a bit of his gesture.
His students, eager to do everything to help me and please the one they clearly admire immensely, stretch a large black canvas over the high wall of a patio ideally lit by a skylight.
I sense that the master is in a hurry. It will be one take and not two, I fear.
He is already in action, slightly in profile, bothered by the somewhat obscene eye of the camera.
He is still as lively and precise, one can almost distinguish, in the void of the air, the elegant mark of his writing.
No emphasis, no sham, just the right and necessary gesture.
That’s how one should be when dancing, oblivious of oneself, solely concerned with tracing in the space something worthwhile that the body delivers. He draws from the animal in him the intelligence of writing.
The gesture is beautiful, entirely given, allowing the gaze to rest on it without it being affected.
The skylight will forever keep the secret of what, in a few minutes, was written, drawn from the dark spiral of the energy of a man at the peak of his art.
Later, he invites me upstairs where his works are displayed, paintings, watercolors, calligraphies whose quality and strength leave me a bit stunned.
Master SHEN Zuo Chang is also a great painter.
You can see that he has looked at the Moderns, you can also see that he draws abundantly from his own rich and ancient culture, which almost entirely escapes us Westerners who dabble in our “works in progress” and the murky waters of our art market.
SHEN, like the wise, remains discreet and continues his work without worrying too much about being part of the game, the one that is played in the void of ambitions.
Towards the end of a long collection of paintings, some of which are pure dazzling, I am struck by the masterful representation of an archer aiming at the sun. On the left side of the canvas, glowing discs are drawn. An extraordinary force of simplicity emanates from the almost abstract ensemble.
Perhaps beauty calls for insult, but before this painting, one politely steps back.
Master SHEN explains to me that the canvas depicts a scene from Chinese mythology. To save the kingdom, the famous archer Houyi, at the request of King Yao, extinguished nine of the ten suns that were setting the earth ablaze with their power.
That’s exactly what he does, I think to myself. He attacks this excess of sun that consumes the living. In the blinding whiteness of the page, he shoots the arrow of his brush and draws from the night of the ink something to make the light, which reveals the atrocity of our world, more bearable.
It’s perhaps to better endure our lucidity, which perceives the relentless sun of meaninglessness, that we create, that we become painters, writers, dancers, musicians…
There! I have my title: SHEN Zuo Chang, master of calligraphy, painter for eternity…
The man who killed nine suns.
Heddy MAALEM
—
Between two sets of crunches, Chun Chun emits a throat song, the
Mongolian Khoomii. I’ve noticed that he sings this way when he’s
a bit bored or impatient because the rehearsal is dragging on.
It’s been several days now, since my arrival in Chengdu in the
distant Sichuan, that I’ve been attending the rehearsals of the
company of Er Ge YU, a renowned dancer and choreographer, a
longtime friend.
Yanzi and Yùn are in the corridor. They are smoking their
cigarettes. YueQi, JiaHao, and YunHan for the girls Li and Deng
for the boys are marking one of the scenes from “Strange Stories
from a Chinese Studio,” the latest creation by Er Ge, inspired by
the eponymous book by PU Song Ling, a 17th-century Chinese
writer.
These “Chronicles of the Strange,” rich with some 500 tales as
obsessive as they are fantastical, could be summed up by this
quote: “The world is not short of pretty girls! What idea is there in
wanting to marry a ghost?”
Er Ge’s adaptation is whimsical, virtuoso, sensitive, intelligent, a
bit crazy, and very tumultuous.
I take pleasure in seeing my friend’s vision crystallize day by day.
With energy and determination, she is entirely focused on her
goal. She knows where she is going and, like every creator, walks
through the forest of doubt, pushing aside the thick vegetation ofall kinds of obstacles until she discovers that place where, since
the birth of her project, she intuitively knows she must go.
Chao Chao the designer, Xing the composer, Jie the dramaturge,
each tucked against a wall of the studio, work silently to help
build the whole.
The atmosphere is relaxed on the sixteenth floor of this building in
Chengdu where the rehearsal studio is located.
I observe the dancers’ maneuvers and how, under an apparent
nonchalance, they are attentive to being present at the exact
moment they are needed.
Their level is quite extraordinary even though in China, it is
nothing surprising.
I myself, over a decade ago, had the chance to work here, to know
and appreciate the Chinese dancers.
I note the remarkable progress that has been made. In addition to
their high technical level, the availability, maturity, and creativity
of each one.
Above all, and this is what matters most to me, their kindness and
modesty.
I have often witnessed the somewhat disdainful arrogance of some
contemporary dancers who, for some strange reason, seem deeply
imbued with their importance and supposed superiority. It’s
insufferable arrogance and most often marks a tragic lack of real
talent that cannot be masked by a facade of assurance
consolidated by a disdainful clique.
How good it is to be elsewhere and in better company.As good professionals, the dancers sketch for the umpteenth time
the precise architecture of their movements.
It is the moment of the 90’ run-through.
Er Ge knows she will have to trim and shorten, identify the
repetitions, renounce them, condense her message so that it
delivers, on stage, the impact of her gathered energy.
I always watch a bit mesmerized despite my long experience, the
metamorphosis of bodies when the energy truly circulates.
No more pretending.
In the slightly stifling heat of the studio, each gives their best
without holding back.
What energy and what transformation!
The staff rushes around Er Ge to offer their critiques and
impressions. The discussion in Chinese is passionate.
I take advantage of my total ignorance of the language to do what
I love most, observe and let my mind invent the song that will
come to it.
Capture the poetry of the moment, understand the profound
meaning of things and, with a bit of luck, thanks to others, that of
my own life.
Yùn stretches conscientiously, her long braid sweeping the floor.
Tall dancers are often unaware of the beauty that flows through
them. The pretty YueQi bustles about on tiptoe joking with JiaHao
with the dazzling smile, YunHan turns a face of slightly unreal
perfection towards the ever-gray nostalgic sky of Chengdu. Yanziwith the cat-like face jokes with Chun Chun who has enrolled her
in his abdominal workouts, Deng stretches discreetly in his corner
while casting amused glances at the fitness slaves. Li taps on his
computer. I know he is curious about everything and especially, at
this moment, about Tango and how he could join my friend
tanguero, Camilo, in Cali.
Tomorrow, I start filming with the dancers.
We are curious about each other.
Tomorrow will be a good day.
I will make their portraits. I will try, in any case, in the abundant
and slightly grayish light of the large bay window that opens onto
the infinite monstrosity of Chengdu’s skyscrapers.
I am surrounded by twenty million others who go about their
business in total indifference to what is happening in this studio
where, as in many places around the world, men and women,
mostly young, feel the need to say with their bodies something
about their human condition that words fail to express.
I think of the Fayum portraits, their frontal beauty, that “gaze of
the dead” whose life force reaches us across the centuries.
How little the millions of pixels of my camera weigh compared to
the intact power of encaustic and linen, gilding and beeswax, fig
sycamore wood!No matter, I make the gesture because it is my desire and
necessity.
Gazes of the dead for gazes of the living, gestures, movements, the
energy of those who dance and speak to us today.
What will they tell me tomorrow? Will they offer their intimate
truth? Or will they offer me the lie of their most beautiful mask?
We must be there and take it all in, seize the true grace of the
moment.
Grace, beauty, and truth that will be given to me.
Tomorrow.
Heddy MAALEM
Chengdu, June 202
Nothing is easy for dancers.
Auditions, for example, are often a distressing scramble.
Yet there is an obvious fact that seems to escape everyone: hiring mercenaries is like bringing war into one’s own home.
Committing without conviction surely kills what one claimed to live for.
Ideally, when possible, it’s best to let affinities play out.
Dancing is not within everyone’s reach.
The least one can do is to know their body, to have made the effort to understand its structure.
But above all, it’s better to be what the Americans call “a natural.”
A talent. A presence as well.
Innate.
Even if some claim otherwise, I have always observed that some stand out while others struggle to exist, most simply not being in their place.
I remember Laïa in Barcelona.
She was late and running to join the group already at work. The stride of a Californian surfer, the obviousness of the same sun.
And Soile, a wild and pale flame in the light of Holland, as if alone,
without the agitation of forty dancers managing to obscure that intense,
fierce, and mysterious presence in herself.
And then Er Ge, finally.
I was in China. I remember.
We were a week away from the premiere of the Chinese version of my Rite of Spring.
One of the directors of the Sichuan company, the one who smoked too much and spoke with a raspy voice:
“You must see a girl, she is very strong.”
Cigarettes in one hand, phone in the other, he insisted despite my refusal to integrate a new member on such short notice.
I ended up giving in.
We were rehearsing at the theater.
A small ball of energy and grace leapt smoothly onto the stage.
A tiger’s leap in a porcelain body, round, slender, and powerful at the same time, discreet and with extraordinary athletic radiance.
What an appearance!
Years have passed. Er Ge YU has danced for me, always with talent, humility, kindness, and great professionalism.
She leads a successful career in Europe and Asia.
Here she is accomplished, mature, with a grave and profound beauty.
To say how she dances seems impossible to me.
It’s a sensation that runs through you and surprises you.
A small young woman with a patient body stands before you with reserve.
The dance takes her, and it’s an explosion of beauty. I mean, this contradictory twist between what you see and what should be and yet is not and changes every second with an almost inhuman vivacity. And it’s slow and then fast, held, contained, and, given, abandoned, delivered and handed over and yet kept secret, buried within oneself, like a treasure, a light, an ancient jewel of the Celestial Empire.
It takes work, determination, courage, and deep intuition, year after year, in front of short-sighted audiences and polarized critics, to find the strength to fight and bring forth in oneself all the richness of such an ancient culture, that ours, beside it, seems barely born.
ER Ge in Chinese means Princess and other things too that I have forgotten.
Her parents named her well, making her the heir to a long dynasty of women and men who mastered the art of thinking with and through the body.
This dancer resembles the writing of Shi Zhou, a great calligrapher and master of the Forest of Brushes. Rounded and angular, crazily cursive, incredibly virtuosic.
She is the ink too, that smoky black that swirls in her chest. Her heart is like an ink stone that grinds the wood of the necessary black for the inscription of each true gesture.
Today, a star shines there but we do not see it, we who no longer look at the sky, who have no idea of what once connected the earth to the firmament, we who accept to live in the absence of beauty.
I remember Kirk Douglas’s tirade, from the time he played that cowboy as wild as his mare Whiskey: “I can’t imagine the world getting better. Like you, I see it getting worse. I see freedom strangled like a dog, everywhere I look. I see my own country collapsing under ugliness, …”
A beautiful film, a masterpiece. It comes to mind because I remember that rider united with his golden horse like the image of a threatened beauty forcing the barbed wire prohibiting the ancient wild plains.
Er Ge makes me think of that magnificent surge that runs through the whole film. The struggle of a humanity trying to escape the crushing discourse of the world.
This dancer is a solitary warrior, discreet and gentle, who unerringly shoots the bright arrows of her beauty.
She will never abandon her high and necessary solitude but if you meet her, her dance will pierce you.
HEDDY MAALEM
I met Master Tangkok Lee in a park in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.
He was observing some of his students practising “pushing hands”, a Tai Chi chuan exercise in which the pairs push each other while trying to gain the upper hand.
“There is no technique, says Master Lee, you have to practise, that’s how you learn.”
It’s already getting hot in the morning as the sun prepares to bake the immense heart of beautiful Kuala Lumpur.
The park is pleasant. A few strollers. A little peace and quiet amidst the incessant hustle and bustle of the city.
Master Lee talks at length and freely. He doesn’t play shaman.
Only his eyes remain silent and see you.
He looks taller than he really is. This is due to his thinness. He is slender and calm, fragile on the outside and strong on the inside. That’s how we should be.
We should leap out of ourselves, unafraid to pit our fragility against the harshness of the world.
Master Lee doesn’t make a fuss, he doesn’t pose, he goes around, laughs a lot, and gives good advice to his students, who sweat and laugh at their own efforts in what will soon become a steam room.
I observe the modesty of this practice from afar. Thousands of miles from where destiny has placed me, I see men trying to understand their own obscurity by practising the art of combat.
For a long time I did the same thing.
I put my hand in the Shadow’s mouth.
I felt the energy swirling in it.
First it’s fear,” said Master Lee. That’s what you have to tackle. That’s what you have to understand. Practice is what really allows you to do it.
This man is sympathetic and benevolent.
I sense that he sees, through the strange outsider that I am to him, someone who listens and who has also in his own way, used the combat with others to avoid his own destruction.
“I’d like to film the essence of your movement, I say to Master Lee.
– What would you film? My Tai Chi has no form.
– So let’s film what has no form. I’ll do my best.
– Why not?”
The students push and sweat, struggle and dodge, test and fail.
The other remains intractable. It’s a closed door. We don’t have the key. Armlock doesn’t work. Brute force builds a wall inside and out of our heads.
The other is the key, of course, but how do you open it?
… He has come.
We’re at the Ramli Hassan studio, high up in Bukit Tunku, its owner Sabera, runs it with elegance and firmness.
He’s wearing a simple, silky Tai Chi Chuan outfit. He is calm as usual, a little embarrassed by the presence of the camera.
This man doesn’t like to be watched or imprisoned in any damned box.
He consents out of empathy and perhaps a certain curiosity about how I’m going to get out of what can quickly become a predicament.
I film him, first standing in the oblique light of the large window from which the great mosque can be seen through the vegetation and the smog formed by the hellish pollution.
He makes a few movements. All I can see is his lanky silhouette, as if he had stepped out of the hands of some tropical Giacometti.
He seems a little absent, not knowing what to give to the camera’s greedy, one-eyed gaze.
What he sets in motion can no longer be grasped. Everything happens inside a man who has come so far he has become the path itself.
His lightweight, solemn body is an interrogation. Nothing else is perceptible.
I find myself filming the question.
I’m used to it.
Is he confused? More like deprived of his own presence, his body gracefully traces the essence of a form in space. It is precise and vague at the same time. A little elsewhere, he nevertheless effortlessly demands the presence of the other.
I suggest he sits down. “What for?, he asks.
– The same thing.
– You’re an excellent fighter,” he says with a half smile.
– I film.
I see nothing. All I feel is the gathered silence of the few people watching the filming.
Something important is happening in the almost empty gestures of this dignified man, sitting up straight in the armchair.
We finish. He stands up, visibly relieved. I sense that all this is not for him and I almost blame myself for putting him in a situation that
doesn’t suit him.
But he smiles.
“The problem is always fear”, he says.
I’m a bit taken aback. He seems to be picking up where we left off in the park.
Being filmed was a non-event for him.
“You mustn’t be wary. Being on guard is already showing fear. You have to stay calmly on your axis and watch your opponent exhaust himself in his own rage.”
I agree. He’s right. You end up understanding that there is no other meaning to fighting than that of the necessary abandonment, while preserving the vertical that the fight has built up.
But why does he insist so much on this point?
He leaves us politely. I’m still a bit puzzled. I have a feeling I’m missing something.
I rationalise, The master is most likely tired. I shouldn’t have insisted on filming him.
That evening, watching the footage, I understand.
At the same time as I find the music that, in my opinion, reveals what is hidden in the simplicity of the gestures, I sense the lesson that was given to me while I was struggling to grasp something ineffable.
A man was addressing me insistently and had not stopped doing so.
He was seeing me and waving.
Hiding behind my camera, I didn’t listen to him.
But he was showing me the unfinished thing, the thing we can’t achieve, but the gesture that remains, the stripped-down form, the purity, the thing to which we aspire and to which, sometimes, we have devoted our lives.
He was showing me a whole man and nothing but the man himself,
master and gardener of a splendid flowering of movements like so many simple flowers constantly blooming in the hollow of trembling hands.
Yes, it’s fear that we have to fight, and in the face of death, we have to stand tall, unguarded, and sing our Chanson de geste.
There is no before, no original intention. There is something that wills and wants.
We are alive, now, in the Openness.
You also have to see, hear and listen. Do not be fooled by your confusion.
I wrote to Master Lee to thank him for his availability. Wishing me luck, he sent me a text by Chuang Tzu, the wandering master of ecstatic walks.
It’s about a man in a boat in the middle of a lake. The title is “The Empty Boat”.
This is what true man is, an empty boat in the immense emptiness of the Tao.
I think back to Master Lee and his formless Tai Chi.
Those who have the unfortunate idea of opposing him will pick up the tab. They remind me strangely of those customers who push open the door of the saloon in the Far West. The door beats to let them through,
it doesn’t resist but swings quietly on its hinges. Everyone enters the bar and finds what they came looking for. Some find oblivion, others the illusory company of the pretty barmaid, many the violence they’ve brought along with them, others still, the sadness they can’t drown.
Few of them have enough intelligence to find what can be found with a little luck and discernment: faith, love, hope and even friendship.
By gracefully pivoting to face my frontal request, Tangkok Lee, a simple inhabitant of Petaling Jaya, Tai Chi Chuan master and wise
reader of the great Chuang Tzu, helped me to lighten my boat a little,
but also to understand that, to go out onto the lake and then cross the great river of the world, you first had to set your own sail and then dare to give it to the wind.
Heddy Maalem – Kuala Lumpur, June 2023
His dance eludes us. We tend to want to attribute a style to it, to lock it into the narrow box of the déjàvu, to put it in a box so as to avoid talking about it.
We have to go against the grain and state: “
This dancer is a master. A master of himself, of his own motion, angel or demon out of the box, beyond our grasp.
Spiritual, there’s no doubt about it.
His movement is part of the right dilatation of the time needed for the perception that comes from Swee keong Lee understanding the rhythm and the space, but also the randomness of our gaze, our almost inability to pay real attention.
He dances, choosing to ignore the prevailing winds,
worrying only about what matters: darkness, spacetime, the energy too – in other words, what rises and falls from our night, and which the gesture brings to light.
You have to admire the one who, far from the tangle of contemporary pandemonium, is fighting a real battle, a war that must be fought endlessly; for Beauty.
In the silence, his dance becomes music.
He moves in the stillness, giving birth to a “Melody of hings”.
There lies rarity!
I think of our contemporary ridicule, these futile contortions, these exsanguinated movements that rally votes nonetheless.
This scramble for visibility when there is obviously so little to show.
He stays away from the rush. He works body and soul.
He softens, he stretches, he cleans, he breathes and, above all, he listens to what rises to the surface from within. This set of disordered impulses that he discerns and uses, understands and sublimates.
He is sharp and clear-cut; everything about him is acute awareness of the moment, respect for organic movement, understanding through the body of the source of wisdom.
The border between the danced movement and his everyday gestures is tenuous, as if all he had to do was narrow the focus a little for the dance to suddenly appear and lavishly unfold.
It’s probably pointless to want to talk about dance, but we have to express freely what we perceive and what appears to be precious and rare in order, perhaps, to touch on what has already disappeared.
The more I look at this man, the more I say to myself that he embodies what every dancer should strive for, the evidence of the danced motion, the body as a work of art.
There’s nothing narcissistic about that, simply someone who has given himself over to asceticism and who has profoundly understood the difference between more or less inventive gesticulation, movement -even if virtuoso- and dance, understood not just as a thought but as a poetics of movement.
To be the blank page and then the hand that draws, to be the light and the opposite of the day, to be a sensitive animal in the eternal present and the soul that ponders the blackness that comes from the abyss.
Being absent in order to embody the presence, being before the word and yet address it.
“It is the night of the world that advances here to meet each of us” wrote Hegel. The phrase comes to mind when you see him dancing. His motion is a shadow casted. He comes from this “dance of darkness”,
Japanese Butô. He has discarded its excesses to retain its depth, its awareness of a world of piercing pain and its ambition to embody it.
He dances the night that walks inside us.
His feet arrange themselves perfectly where he has decided to stop. His eyes settle calmly on the audience who have come to admire his performance. His gaze is a first gesture, the space is open, the show can begin.
We are here, in fact, to observe ourselves, gathered together between light and shadow.The darkness calls for silence, then the light returns, leaving us speechless, spying in the shadows, confused animals of the dark forest. We remain a mystery to ourselves that must be presented again and again to feel its outlines.
The show ends.
Black curtain again before the return f our voices and the noise in the day’s lie.
Dancing took place between two nights. We keep a trace of it.
He develops his movement, which suddenly stops. The line runs through him as pure as the painter’s commanding stroke on the canvas. An unrepentant motion.
It leaves us speechless. The incessant chatter of the discourse finally interrupted. We are left silent before the enigma, motionless at last, before the sphinx, this animal rock that has perhaps moved.
There is something mineral about him. I remember an old Aikido master. I could see him walking from the entrance to the Dojo, kneeling down with agility and suddenly coming to a complete standstill, becoming a stone placed there, facing us and our ignorance of what a body is and the abyss it contains.
That was my first lesson.
Non-movement exists and a stone can speak.
It is rare, in fact, to see a man dancing. Most of the time something is wrong. It’s hard to say exactly what.
The impression is of a simulacrum, a more or less skilful gesticulation that takes place while forgetting the need for a real statement.
” A dance that’s not worth it” to paraphrase Chabrier.
So we turn back to nature, the animal moving from the very place that dance seeks, the tree whose branches, captive to the wind, move space with the tact and intelligence of the arm and hand finally subjected to the motions breathed into them.
All of nature guides us towards the right gesture, that is to say, unwillingness, patient listening, true animation, harmonious singing that rises effortlessly from all that tends to live and silently accepts death. And then, the lightning and its liveliness, the gush, the leap of pure joy out of the wave.
The stillness, at last, just before darkness, the sudden silence of the living, preparing for “the dreadful night ».
He goes, like Diogenes of Sinope, carrying his dance like the other carries his lamp, a living flame in the blinding day.
This is what this dancer carries with him. He is there,
facing us, upright and courageously laden with the burden that falls to us and that we neglect.
This burden, our deep humanity and the inhuman darkness that makes it up, is what lifts the weight of truth from every dance.
Without it, what’s the point?
We might as well turn the other way.
There is so much to contemplate, the grace of the children, the movement of the meadow in the distance where the horse flees, the step of the beloved woman who returns to us, all the dance of the world that is given to us and that Swee Keong Lee, great dancer, unnoticed jewel, continues to dance for us, carefree captives of a disregarded night.
Heddy Maalem
