Post 9/11 has become the new cultural branding, and it is easy to fix that label to Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's latest work, Foi, which is as fissured by images of conflict as any dance I have seen. The opening scene, in particular, feels hard-wired to our current jumpy times. Inside a concrete-walled square, bodies lie scattered. Medieval music (played and sung live by Capilla Flamenca) drifts through the air, while dancers dressed in beige costumes flit mournfully past the devastation like angels from a more innocent age.
But Foi is imagined on too broad a canvas to file under a single soundbite. Within minutes, these dead bodies are engaged in a talking, dancing dialogue with the angels, and what follows is a hallucinatory kaleidoscope of scenes, violent and tender, poised on an imagined interface between present and past. There is no binding theme other than the whisperings of people across centuries and cultures. At times the angels seem like benign witnesses to the traumas of the living. Violence disrupts the choreography with almost abstract regularity, the dancers' limbs shaken by earthquakes, felled by gunfire. A woman searches for her lost son, the singing and dancing angels grieve.
Sometimes it is the ghosts who impose ancient violence on to the present, silencing the living so that the dead can speak through their bodies. A courting couple are foiled by a malevolent ghost who turns their signals of attraction into attack. A young girl is abused by two silently vicious spirits.
Sometimes the dead and living inhabit the same scenarios, to form a random sampling of the human species. As individuals they are divided by language and culture, but as a group they are united by the same helpless imperatives. Each one clutches at a faith, from the riotously camp transvestite who lives by her Jesus Saves platitudes, to the self-mutilating fanatic, to the woman who counts off her precious memories like rosary beads.
But they cannot speak to each other nor can they defend themselves against the powers that would crush them (a woman in stars-and-stripes boxing gloves who randomly pummels her fellow performers, another woman, clutching a hammer, who makes them dance to her Stalinist rhythms).
The cast are extraordinary, reckless and compelling, and Cherkaoui is clearly a major talent. Though Foi might, objectively, benefit from some sharp editing, its vision cuts disturbingly close to the bones of our current situation.
