Oqda – the threading of out-of-joint bodies into a knot of intercultural dialogue

OQDA at KoresponDance at Žďár nad Sázavou (Mohammed a Wahib Hammichovi, Emma Houston). Foto: Dragan Dragin.

Author Diana De Fex

A sober set of a table and 3 chairs is all the performers need to set up a dialogue between their different movement languages and cultural backgrounds. The brothers Mohammed and Ouahib Hammich bring in traditional Moroccan acrobatics, an ancestral knowledge that has been passed down for generations in the Hammich family. Farah Deen brings in house and hip-hop dance, and her experience of being of mixed Austrian and Sri Lankan heritage.

In The Life of Lines, anthropologist Tim Ingold refers to a knot as the joining of two or more distinct elements by tying them together, whereupon their memory is affected by being in contact with each other, without dissolving their individuality. Intercultural dialogue can be approached as an act of knotting instead of fusing, which, while highlighting interdependency, keeps visible the differences and tensions that the myth of the ‘melting pot society’ and ‘conflictless multiculturalism’ may disguise.

Initially, the performers seem to be at odds with each other and the objects, and use their movement practices to find new ways of relating: Mohammed and Ouahib Hammich, who start out bouncing uncomfortably on the chairs and tapping on the table as if impatiently waiting, begin to use them as support to perform rolls, cartwheels and, increasingly complex somersaults and human pyramids. Deen accusatively points her index fingers at the other two performers and in other directions, including towards the audience, before turning them towards herself, giving way to the characteristic disjoint movements of hip hop in which different body parts move with a time lag making the body seem temporarily out of joint.

As the piece progresses, the performers engage in an ambiguous relationship with one another. Sometimes they use very theatricalised gestures and dialogue to show their disagreement, curiosity, and even mocking one another – though they also increasingly cooperate and learn from the other’s movement practices. The acrobats join in the rhythmic body percussion that Deen initiates, and Deen joins into the Hammlichs’ human pyramids. They eventually dance energetically as a synchronised trio, and finish by breathing together and resting upon each other’s shoulders as a seemingly tired, still synchronised, trio. This reminds me of the affective and physical effort and expenditure of the self that is required to take a step towards another, to let oneself be affected by this other, be it a human or non-human being, or even the land to where one migrates. It is perhaps upon this expenditure of the self that the knot of intercultural dialogue can be tied.

There is a defining moment of the piece, when the knotting begins and relations among performers begin to turn more cooperative. It is after an apparently banal disagreement about where their countries of origin are located on an imaginary flat map. The plasticity of the performers’ bodies is required to regain the memory of location of these and other places. In the process of this failed and abstract location of places, the sense of orientation is lost, which is a trait common to experiences of migration, and the north collapses with the south until another potential organisation of the territory emerges. This new organisation is enabled by the paradoxical acts of memory loss and embodied remembrance, weaved into a common, yet differentiated territory, where cooperation becomes possible.

However, I wonder if the conflicts and differences in the piece were too easily smoothed out into an intercultural understanding that suppresses class difference, and with it, the conflict and tension that the concept of ‘the knot’ could potentially sustain. If I think of the audience as a string in this knot, I wonder what part of my interiority has to give in? In other words, what part of my memory is affected, in order to join the dialogue of the knot? I wonder about the little effort that the piece demands of me as a viewer, in comparison to the energy expenditure of the performers – who visibly perform their exhaustion. I can only speculate about their pleasure, but can account of my own pleasure of seeing their bodies balance and bend with such prowess. In Oqda, the uneven distribution of pleasure and expenditure between audience and performers remains opaque, as a symptom of the invisibility of class difference in the piece. This opacity could perhaps have been challenged by not ending the performance right at the moment when their exhausted bodies begin to rest. This might have given me the time to be affected by their self-expenditure, hence making class difference, at least between performers and audience, perceptible.

On the other hand, the affects of pleasure and exhaustion that can’t be grasped by critique are perhaps there to entice us into remaining playful – even in highly problematic situations. For example, at the beginning of the piece, there is a display of higher status and power when Deen crushes and extends a plastic bottle in her hands, which seems to have the power to remotely control the acrobats’ bodies, who graciously, while on a handstand, expand and contract their lower bodies, matching the bottle’s movements. Even this extreme form of manipulation remains playful and light-hearted, allowing for hierarchies to be unstable and temporary, as what follows is the three performers sitting as equals on the table, making an effort to communicate without speaking each other's languages.

Traditional Moroccan acrobatics in the bodies of Ouahid and Mohammed Hammlich, as well as hip hop in the body of Farah Deen, are threads that have come a long way across time and cultures to be performed on this Prague stage. Oqda is an entanglement of memory, pleasure and self-expenditure. The children’s laughter in the audience reminds me that I need to unlearn part of my values, before I can learn to tie my(self) into such a knot.

Review written during the workshop Writing about dance (in the Times of Corona), organised by Dance and Performing Arts Criticism in Europe, supported by EEA Grants 2014-2021.

Oqda
Devised and performed by: Mohammed Hammich, Ouahib Hammich, Farah Deen
Director: Etta Ermini
World première:  24.06.2021, KoresponDance, Prague

Film Oqda
Cinematography and direction: Toni Laznik
Production: Šárka Sklenářová and Eva Papánková