Aranzaquil

About the two performances: Les pas perdus [The Lost Steps] and Aranzaquil

The creation of these two performances at La Maison de la Danse in December 1983 was an opportunity for me personally to produce my first group performance after a rather unfortunate experience two years previously during the Festival d’Avignon.

I had been relatively inexperienced in communication with regard to by creations and, to boot, I can’t remember whether there was a chance to write a few introductory lines for the programme to be distributed to visitors.

I would like to use this archiving opportunity to look back at what it was that underlay the writing of these two ballets, considered to be a genuine diptych.

At the time, I was a regular visitor of Peter Brook’s creations at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and was deeply moved by his film “Meetings with Remarkable Men” based on the 1979 work by Georges Gurdjeff.

The film traced Gurdjeff’s spiritual quest in search of a mysterious brotherhood which he finally encountered in the Gobi Desert after a long trip. He discovered a small community for whom the search for spiritual elevation involved assiduous practice of music and dance. There was, moreover, a dance scene which particularly impressed me through its sheer clarity and power. 

However, above all, this film revealed the existence of a tradition, the like of which I was previously unaware, of which both the initiative and community dimension further reinforced the aspiration of bringing together the spiritual search and artistic practice which I harboured at this time.

These two performances hosted in 1983 in Lyon were, for me, a manner of portraying the deep impact of this film.

Les pas perdus [The Lost Steps] was, therefore, created on the basis of elements which had really left a strong impression on me during this dance scene in the film, that of the rigorous construction and geometry based on the ubiquitous rhythmic nature. I asked Denis Levaillant to pen a partition in nine acts which would offer a series of internal combinations, and he proposed that this be played by Youval Missenmacher on a Zarb, which is a traditional Iranian percussion instrument.

I wrote a dozen choreographic phrases over these nine acts on which almost the entire dance would be based, playing with a host of orientations throughout these phrases, combined with combinations of duos, trios and quartets, etc.

However, from the very outset I knew that this dance would only form part of the programme and that there should be a follow-up which showed the threat which I felt weighed over the transmission of certain traditions. 

And so, I imagined a second section in the form of a debacle by a small group of people violently chased out of their territories and forced into an exodus cutting them off from their cultural roots. I invented the name of a village, “Aranzaquil”, which for me was located in Afghanistan, before the invasion of the Soviet Union.

This part of the diptych, unlike the first, written as a full partition, was made up of a hotchpotch of scenes all resulting from improvisations proposed to dancers on the basis of various themes related to exodus, deportation and the loss of cultural and spiritual landmarks, of which the sequence shows the progression of the internal uprooting of the characters.

In this second part of the composition the music followed that of the dance, with Denis Levaillant coming to the studio in person to watch the writing in progress of the various successive sequences and composing the music as this was happening.

Costumes and set design were developed and produced by Francis Coulet. Costumes were inspired by traditional village clothing (based on Japanese kimonos), in a ritual manner in the first act and on a more daily basis in the second.

Lighting was created by John Davis, who I knew well as lighting technical director for Carolyn Carlson at the GRTOP.

This was the second time I had worked with Denis Levaillant after our duo “D. D. Blue Gold Digger” presented at the Georges Pompidou Centre in 1982.

Dominique PETIT

December 2021