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Nationalism – it’s a strange beast. You might expect every country’s ferment to cluster around similar concerns (foreigners, flags) – but this 2022 show by leading Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui performed here at Sadler’s Wells delves into Flemish national identity, and a weird stew it is.
For a start, Belgian is a two-tongue nation – as the title of this show, a mixture of French and archaic Flemish, suggests. Cherkaoui himself has a Moroccan father and Flemish mother, and it’s the maternal side he digs into here. Though, as a woman sings mournfully during the show, “Don’t call me Flemish Nationalist / Being Flemish is already hard enough.”
London welcomed lots of Cherkaoui’s work earlier this century. He made dance for Carlos Acosta and the Royal Ballet, shows based on manga, and collaborations with sculptor Anthony Gormley: most memorably 2008’s Sutra, featuring Shaolin monks and many wooden boxes. He also likes to get messy – sprawling shows on big ideas, with speech, music and sculpture alongside dance.
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Vlaemsch is one of these: a baggy bear of a piece that pulls in art history, religious iconography and Belgian’s colonial legacy. A feminist curator turned incautiously candid tour guide peppers us with fact and argument, and the show also tweaks the Flanders landscape: grey skies bearing down on flat grey lands. The design is dominated by greyscale props from sculptor Hans Op de Beeck, with oversized objects from 17th-century still life, like a skull, fruit and guttering candle.
Cherkaoui has always been a richly varied choreographer, but the dance here is thin gruel: swirling tumbleweed with little traction. Instead, he stages endless whimsical sequences with arch costumes and picture frames. An international cast of dancers (from “all corners of a world in conflict,” says the programme) repeatedly peer or clamber through the frames – a laborious way to argue that cultural heritage and preconceptions will shape what you see.
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The best bits are biting. Cherkaoui builds his large cast into arresting stage pictures, like a living gallery. An older woman (Christine Leboutte) plays a woman who repurposes her spinning wheel as a race-winning bicycle (she also has a deep, killer voice). The plangent musicians of Ratas del Viejo Mundo (“rats of the old world”) release Renaissance polyphony with some chanson thrown in. Tister Ikomo from Kinshasa croons sweetly, but everyone rams fingers in their ears or over their eyes, refusing to engage with Belgian’s history of Congolese exploitation.
Another nation’s cultural baggage might always be somewhat bewildering – but even so, I can’t believe that this is the most interesting piece Cherkaoui has made in recent years. Indeed, a lauded collaboration with disabled dance artist Marc Brew comes to Sadler’s Wells East next week, and promises greater punch and personality.
Vlaemsch (chez moi) at Sadler's Wells, 19 - 20 September, sadlerswells.com
