What bodies can do

What is extraordinary about a body sprawling on a sofa? Nothing. What is extraordinary about a person’s head appearing to fall backwards, as if being drawn towards the ground? Practically nothing. And yet in Madame Plaza these poses become extraordinary. Because Madame Plaza originates in a huge shift in time and space. It is condensed into a special moment, experiencing in the here and now pure presences that have been crystallised in a suspended intensity, somewhere between dance and performance.

Three Moroccan Aitas perform in it, accompanied by Bouchra Ouizguen who could be their daughter: totally different, but infinitely close and in tune. These Aitas are cabaret artists. Singers, as a matter of fact. Not dancers. “Madame Plaza” is an old nightclub that is still open in Marrakech, where Bouchra Ouizguen lives. She is a choreographer. Contemporary. Inspired by her training in and exchanges with the west. But as a young girl, she did oriental dance for a long time.

There she put together her body which she then wanted to take apart in order to achieve a more modern expression. Currently, continuing along this same path, Bouchra Ouizguen is back to explore this other body she initially inhabited. Explore it, appreciate it, bring it into play, confront it. A body is built. A body has a story. A body is full of culture. It is conjugated from the private and the collective. There is nothing stable about it. It participates in a construction of identity which is equally problematical, made from exchanges and evolutions.

This is what is being performed on stage in Madame Plaza: a kind of encounter, going towards rather than coming from somewhere, in keeping with the unknown rather than the known. The process of moving towards the other creates a shift here in the angle of observation: this has to happen to eliminate the notion of categories. For many long weeks, in the early stages of what is not intended to be a “show”, the four artists do not devote themselves to rehearsing so much as take the time to live together first, discover one another and modify their expertise.

The Aitas are different, but contemporary, urban. Layer by layer, in poses, postures and gesticulations, their monumental bodies quiver with a story of women whose singing can electrify their male audience’s sensuality: one moment being fêted as divas before being rejected as quasi prostitutes. Bouchra Ouizguen’s artistic observation will have been to reveal what else these bodies have to say that is different from what they usually perform in cabaret, this time living through themselves rather than for their voice alone. And so allowing themselves incredible fantasies, rolling about on the ground or imitating men. Madame Plaza reveals the unsuspected.

Bouchra Ouizguen’s choreographic work will have been about allowing this encounter, orchestrating it, inventing its particular space-time, and then showing what these bodies can do. Confronted with so many movements, the hope is that the western spectator will welcome the strangeness of these gestures. And then admit, in this incredible moment, that like any other, the body of a Moroccan woman is bursting with meaning and is about so much more than the obsessive fixation on the issue of wearing a veil. Before it moves on to be welcomed elsewhere.