exiting pharaohs
North African choreographic imaginaries
Hello les petits roseaux,
Alors, on se la coule douce ou ienb? between the celebration of Eastern, the Dutch Royal family, and the Fête du travail — busy weeks we’re having atm.
Today, I felt like talking about a few dance pieces I’ve encountered or even danced and that, in one way or another, relate to North Africa. Beware, dear reader: you might be in for a strange ride, uncomfortable at first (especially for me, as you’ll soon find out), but less bumpy towards the end, I promise.
1905-1912 — Egyptomania / Orientalism [ = ooops ]
uuuu yea baby, let’s begin at the source: ballet & modern dance pieces.
Skipping the Bayadère, I’ll start with a personal ‘favorite’ example of mine: the in-sa-ne Pharaoh’s Daugther. This 4-hour long spectacular ballet was choreographed by Marius Petipa in 1905 and presented in Russia by the Bolshoi. It was still programmed until fairly recently at major ballet houses like the Opéra Garnier in Paris. Considering the title, one might expect a plot closer to the original Pharaoh’s Daughter story with the rescue of little baby Moses floating on the Nile River. But nein, the Pharaoh’s Daugther ballet, my dear reading friend, was actually inspired by The Roman de la Momie — a little confusion which already smells like a burning oil warehouse.
Ze plot: an English nobleman, high on opium in an Egyptian pyramid, dreams he's an ancient man who falls in love with a Pharaoh's daughter. Their epic romance defies royal duty and death, but ends as this English respectable man wakes—forever haunted by love lost in time. With his English nobleman imagination, this dude witnesses all kinds of stuff: kings and queens doing fouttés, dangerous guards showing their best développés, fishermen doing entrechats quatre, palaces, palm trees, rivers made of foam, cobras in tuttu, etc. Although sprinkled with historical inaccuracy all throughout, the beautiful, expensive decors and costumes were initially supposed to give the audience a better feel and insight into ‘Egyptian taste and nationality’.
[ . . . ]
Is this necessary to even say. This ballet is beyond political incorrectness: it is simply 100% offensive and racist. I won’t even post an excerpt here, but hey, it’s still all out there on the internet when the whole thing should be banned. Rather unfortunately for my inner child. I can no longer brag that I once danced in this ballet. Yes, dear reader, I actually performed sections of it with the Bolshoi at the Opéra de Paris when I was ten, in the early 2000s, in front of 2,000 delighted, gullible spectators, including my poor parents. I played one of these little, funny, charming, entertaining, so-called ‘négrillonnes’. I wish this anecdote wasn’t true. But it’s all true. And I’ll spare you the details of our little cute costumes and make up — you can guess it all, Zwarte Piet aesthetics & all.
And this, my friend, was one of ± my brightest moments under the spotlight [ trigger warning: the following photo includes outdated and harmful racial representations ]:
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[ i mean: ]
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alright.
let’s take a big, really big breath together,
remember love will prevail,
exhale from the absolute depth of your lungs,
. . . and move on to a next, much more interesting example: Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune. It was written in 1912, so around the same time as Petipa’s horror show, reflects a similar wave of orientalism in the air. But Nijinsky’s piece is a (thank god) totally different vibe. It was originally conceived as a kind of prologue to Mallarmé’s poem and, of course, set to Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (who, by the way, wasn’t exactly thrilled with the result). Emblematic of the Ballets Russes, the work evokes Mallarmé’s drifting between consciousness and dream — and yes, it’s super sensouél. It draws on the Greek mythological figure of the faun and the aesthetics of ancient Greek art, while also slipping in a subtle touch of something vaguely Egyptian, particularly through its choreographic vocabulary.
And indeed, what’s especially fascinating about Nijinsky’s Faune is its compositional hybridity or the ‘composite-ness’ of the dance. The dancers’ heads and legs are often turned in profile, while their torsos face forward, creating an angular, segmented vocabulary that recalls the flatness of ancient Greek art and Egyptian frescoes. This choreographic language powerfully reinforces the faun’s animal-human ambiguity. Nijinsky was remarkably bold in making such a radical break from classical dance codes, especially for the time.1 At its premiere, people reportedly lost their minds: the piece was called indecent, ugly, a failure, filthy. It nearly sparked a political and diplomatic scandal between France and Russia2. And yet, many Parisians were absolutely captivated by the provocation.
Since the piece never aimed for historical accuracy, it continues to age beautifully. Nijinsky’s Faune still feels fresh: scandalous, strangely beautiful, and unapologetically, gloriously mega queer. So if you don’t know it already (and even if you do), consider this your invitation to drift off:
1980s + 2009 — Bagouet
Back in June 2009, after having processed my pharaonic ballet trauma (and a few other relative triumphs), I had become a ‘pre-professional’ contemporary dancer. I was working my quietly rebellious, 16-year-old a** off with a Romanian teacher who was as extraordinarily unpredictable as mind-opening — the kind of authority figure that shapes you forever. For our end-of-year exam, my fellow students and I had to prepare and present a solo. A bit of context. In France’s national conservatory exams, neither students nor teachers choose the material: the solo is imposed to ensure "fairness." In 2009, the solo was an excerpt from a longer piece by a choreographer I knew nothing about: Dominique Bagouet.
[ couldn’t find the original video or a better version than this one — it’s already miraculous this one is online tbh ]
I remember feeling pretty destabilized by this dance but oddly inspired by its language, how it oscillates between rigidity and a freedom I hadn’t encountered until then. Initially, this dance reminded me the typical 80s postmodern, non-figurative dance conventions: superficially emotionless, geometric, while evoking a primal and symbolic something I couldn’t pinpoint. And it felt like an intelligent and rich piece, an introspective journey that didn’t announce itself. Beneath the simplicity of the movements, preparing the piece was demanding: getting all its precisions in place, finding the right amount of openness and detachment — and, at least for me: the right gaze.
Our teacher, as baffled as we were by the piece, drew a parallel between this solo and Nijinsky’s Faune. It was an interesting and helpful comparison for us. We kept in mind the faun’s lazy, drowsy afternoon, injecting what we understood about the Faune and its Ancient Greek-Egyptian influences= admittedly, a caricature. And quite frankly, some of us were annoyed by the strange music of Bagouet’s solo. It had no real pulse to lean on at first, no familiar melodies, no lyrics we could understand. No one knew where the music came from or what it was exactly. I certainly felt as disoriented as anyone else, but as I rehearsed more, I began to “feel” it. Beyond the simple hope of passing my exam, dancing this piece unexpectedly became meaningful.
So. Dear reader. Have you guessed by now?
Yés, extraordinarily, the music from Bagouet’s solo is from the Arab-Andalusian repertoire, specifically from Morocco. It actually took me a good 5-8 years to discover this, and I was stunned by the delayed discovery, especially considering how impactful this dance had been in my life. In fact, Bagouet’s piece was the last proper contemporary dance solo I danced, a rare moments of alignment and presence, but also of body failure. To put it bluntly: during my rehearsal of the piece, I got injured. My body collapsed, from its very core, in a bloodless, invisible yet deep injury. [ the kind that’s strange to describe to others, and strange for others to understand ]
So, merging shitty synchronicities with serendipity, this dance became a portal for me: a) to leave the dance community, confronting its totalitarian tendencies3 that I couldn’t cope with, b) to subconsciously acknowledge how dissociated I had been from my North African origins, and c) to understand that my body was bridging a deep desire to uncover parts of my genealogical roots, and how ‘hurt’ I was from that dissociation. Needless to say, all this took time to unpack, but u kno: it only helped on the long run.
Du coup, sending un gros bisous à Dominique:
Here is what I have found on this very interesting choreographer. Domique Bagouet (1951–1992 = similar generation and fate as Hideyuki Yano) was a leading figure in the Nouvelle danse française movement of the 1980s. He began his dance education by focusing on ballet, before shifting to dancing Balanchine, Béjart, studying with Cunningham and Brown among other American dance pioneers. Bagouet drew inspiration from contemporary experimentation, Baroque dance, Andalusia, and broader Mediterranean themes, exploring dance as a living tradition rather than a formal art. [in passing, for those curious or fans of Pascal Dusapin, you might wanna check out this bizarre piece.]. He was also a generous teacher, sharing his practice with both professional and amateur dancers, showing equal respect and genuine interest in each. Regardless of their background, he encouraged his performers to reach a state of “deeply internalized emotion,” as if caught between memory and movement. In truth, this description exactly encapsulates how his dance resonated with me back in 2009: between memory and movement.
When it came to his Andalusian inspirations, Bagouet wasn’t trying to quote traditional dance forms, but rather to absorb their emotional density and their daily, ritual dimension into a new, liberated vocabulary. His “Andalusia” was an openly imagined, internal landscape — a place that may never have existed, yet whose preserved mosaics and fountains evoked a deep, mysterious kind of beauty. Bagouet carried a semi-naïve, nostalgic gaze that I find delicately handled, not heavy-handed. And notably, to my knowledge, he’s the only contemporary choreographer to have integrated Arab-Andalusian music into his work.
A couple of years ago, as I was beginning my research on Arab-Andalusian music, I stumbled upon this link — a version of the music used in Bagouet’s solo. It reopened the portal once again, from yet another angle, as if each piece of this multidimensional, karmic dance puzzle were arriving in its own time. Enjoy this musique d’après-midi.
2023 — Nacera Belaza
Continuing our time machine journey, we now land in a different era: today-ish, with Nacera Belaza’s minimalist and rather charged/dense choreographic writing.
Born in 1969 in Médéa, Algeria, Belaza moved to France at the age of five and grew up between France and Algeria, between two cultures, without placing one above the other. Remarkably, Belaza never had any formal dance training. She is entirely self-taught, developing her choreographic work by gradually weaving in themes of cultural duality and personal identity. Her style is defined by a continuous breath and a strong focus on repetition, patience—and, I dare say, a quiet echo of violence. At times, she performs along together her equally talented sister, Dalila Belaza.4 Beyond her artistic career in France, Nacera Belaza founded an artist cooperative in Algeria to foster cultural exchange and collaboration between her two homelands.
She views dance as a way to confront the "deafening din of our existences" and to restore existential meaning to gesture. Compared to Bagouet, Belaza is far less naïve but she similarly draws inspiration from everyday and ritual movement. Her work seeks to bridge a vital force that connects the stage to daily life, opening up spaces where one might feel whole again by “listening” for new paths through the body, and getting back to some kind of unknown.
Another striking feature of Belaza’s work is how terre à terre and austere it is. Instead of projecting into some idealized, distant past, her choreography often foregrounds raw, recent realities that many would rather ignore—like the Algerian Civil War and its consequences, including the near-impossibility of contemporary dance in Algeria. Reflecting on her return after the war, she recalled:
I was struck by people’s lack of foresight, a loss of faith in the future, a kind of self-repetition. […] Having undergone brutal colonization and a civil war, Algerians no longer look to the future[…]. When dancing there– around 2001 or 2002–I’d be told contemporary dance wasn’t part of Algerian identity. I’d hear things like, ‘Our identity is about traditional dance, not contemporary dance. We don’t want to open up to that.’ 5
All these themes are evoked in her beautiful piece Paris-Alger from 2003:
Belaza wrote the following poetic description about the piece:
Algeria is not part of the world. It’s as if it turns its back on it to sink into its own belly. Creating there means rediscovering the deep meaning of a scream, and constantly measuring one’s own resistance. The air is dry, brittle—nothing can grow, everything is doomed to break. The body burns through its last reserves. Thought, meanwhile, is caged so that fatality may be fulfilled. One must hold on in order to scream, one must scream for everything to begin again.
I thought maybe a lighthouse should be planted in the heart of Algeria to signal to the rest of the world, to tell life in a desperate yet fiercely persistent way—to take one’s place in that lighthouse and believe oneself to be at the center of the world.
Algeria is not part of the world. 6
As time unfolds, Belaza’s work seems to bridge more and more imaginaries. I first encountered her through La Nuée, a piece deeply reliant on the interplay of light and shadow. Dancers emerged and receded into a central circle, signaled only by dimmed lights in an otherwise pitch-black theater. The movement vocabulary was minimal and relentless: indistinct but systematic marches, runs, static jumps, and centrifugal torsions of the upper body, arms slicing and spiraling into space. In my memory, the soundtrack was made up of layered drum samples, gently filtered, along with rustling noises, cries, and fragments of song from the dancers. The result was trance-inducing. As a spectator, you had to squint, focus, almost hallucinate to perceive the dancers, their subtle movements, their stillness. It demanded an unusually active, engaging kind of process, something quite rare in my experience.
I came across a filmed piece that, music aside [which i’ve deliberately muted — forgive me], is quite similar to La Nuée, and beautifully performed by the amaaazing dancer Paulin Blanc. Enjoy to the max.
I later learned that the piece was created after Belaza traveled through the Midwest of the US, where she attended the Mendota Pow Wow in 2022 — a gathering of First Nations people. For several hours, she observed participants from various Dakota communities entering, forming, and leaving a large circle to dance to a percussive rhythm, each bringing their own stories like a living chorus. Much like with Bagouet, even though Belaza’s choreographic research was sparked by cultures and rituals that weren’t her own, she doesn’t put them on display. These inspirations don’t appear as references or representations. Instead, they’re subliminally folded into the fabric of her work, as if by ricochet.
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And so, as we begin to depart from North African imaginaries, I’ll fly away.
I hope this post brought you some enjoyment, maybe a good laugh, maybe a good thought. Thank you for taking the time to read with me.
all moving on & dancing along, like reeds in the wind
Lucie
ps: shall you have any topics you’d like to me to investigate/write about, i’m open to your suggestions & invitations. 100% silly, dumb topics will be equally considered as supposedly serious ones — we’re inclusive in here & debunking snobbism is one of our top missions
Nijinsky may have paid a steep price for his boldness — professionally, and quite possibly psychologically as well.
According to wiki: “Le Figaro was accused of attacking the Ballets Russes because they opposed France's political policy to ally with Russia, and that they represented an opening to smear all things Russian. The Russian ambassador became involved, French politicians signed petitions, and the President and Prime Minister asked a government commission to report. The Paris police attended the second night of the ballet because of its alleged obscenity, but took no action after they saw the public's support. The ending of the ballet may have been temporarily amended to be more proper.”
nb: some dance communities are the complete opposite but those the ones i was in touch with back then
Here is an example: