When I asked the man if the seat next to him was taken, he didn’t even open his eyes. That’s when I first wondered whether he might not be just another member of the audience.
Sure enough, when the lights went down and the sound of drums rose, he removed his hoodie, stepped bare chested into the center of the space and began walking in circles. He was Michel Onomo, the dancer performing “Rite de passage || solo 2,” by the French choreographer Bintou Dembélé.
Dembélé has been a major figure in the French hip-hop scene for decades, but she drew wider attention five years ago, when she became the first Black female choreographer to be hired by the Paris Opera. The dances at Performance Space New York this weekend, which closed out L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line festival, were the first showings of her work in the United States.
Dembélé, who is of Senegalese heritage, has described her work as an excavation of memory, using the body as a living archive of French enslaved peoples and colonial histories. She and Onomo, also known as Meech, share an interest in the crossover between hip-hop and African diasporic ritual practice. For “Rite,” seats were arranged in concentric rings — the configuration of African circle dances and hip-hop cyphers.
Round and round Onomo went, his circling periodically accelerating and tightening into dervish-like spinning. Occasionally the circling resembled the toprock of a B-boy, and other hip-hop moves entered in here and there: a touch of krump aggression, a bit of house-dance grapevining. Sometimes Onomo opened his chest and arms, tilting back his head in a receptive posture. Other times, he stopped and felt the air with his fingers, letting tremors of energy pass through him with jackhammer force, the shaking blurring his limbs.
Some gestures spoke of resistance or struggle, as when Onomo retreated in a circle with his hands raised in front of him. Later, as he processed haltingly along the space between the outer rings of chairs, his torso bent backward like a tree in a gale. Near the piece’s ending, he snapped backward repeatedly, as if from the impact of a barrage of uppercuts. He also gripped his throat.
Less obviously, in a moment of silence, Onomo snatched at the air in front of his face, over and over. It looked at once as if he were desperately trying to find something, pulling out everything in a package, and trying to speak, yanking words from himself, in vain.
Onomo’s eyes were often closed, as though he might be present in body only, his mind and spirit elsewhere. That choice raised interesting questions about the role of the audience in this theatricalized ritual; less interesting was how all these gestures and movements were spread thinly, stretched out with a few false endings to fill an hour. Onomo’s physicality, too, was oddly stiff and sketched in.
In some ways, the composition of “Rite” mirrored that of the first piece of music in its recorded score: the opening movement of Steve Reich’s “Drumming,” with its African-inspired addition and subtraction of phased patterns. (Later parts of “Rite” featured buzzing and backward sounds by Charles Amblard.) But Dembélé’s structure, not as rigorous as Reich’s, failed to achieve its cyclical intensification. This “Rite” was too much like a dance going in circles.
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