Lights of China

In Chengdu, in the warm, tranquil atmosphere of a studio perched on the sixteenth floor of a building, dancers rehearse. Under the watchful eye of Heddy Maalem, choreographer, director and curious world traveller, they become the silent protagonists of an artistic adventure.

IMMERSION

For several days now, since my arrival in Chengdu in faraway Sichuan, I have been attending rehearsals with the company of Er Ge YU, a well-known dancer and choreographer, and a long-standing friend.

Yanzi and Yùn are in the corridor. They are smoking their cigarettes. YueQi, JiaHao and YunHan for the girls, Li and Deng for the boys, mark one of the scenes in ‘Strange stories in a chinese studio’, Er Ge’s latest creation inspired by the book of the same name by PU Song Ling, a 17th-century Chinese writer. These ‘Chronicles of the Strange’, rich in some 500 tales as obsessive as they are fantastical, could be summed up by this quotation: ‘The world has no shortage of pretty girls!

What an idea to marry a spectre! Er Ge’s adaptation of the tale is whimsical, virtuoso, sensitive, intelligent, a little crazy and very eventful.
Chao Chao the designer, Xing the composer, Jie the playwright, each tucked up against a wall in the studio, work silently to help build the whole.

Er Ge knows that she will have to prune and shorten, identify redundancies, give them up, contract her message so that it delivers, on stage, the impact of her gathered energy.
I watch, still a little dumbfounded despite my long experience, as the bodies metamorphose when the energy really flows. We’re no longer pretending.
In the slightly stifling heat of the studio, everyone gives their all, sparing no effort.
What energy and what transfiguration!

Yùn stretches conscientiously, her long braid sweeping across the floor. Great dancers are often oblivious to the beauty that flows through them.
The pretty YueQi takes small steps, joking with JiaHao with her dazzling smile, YunHan turns a face of slightly unreal perfection towards the nostalgia of Chengdu’s perpetually grey sky. Cat-faced Yanzi jokes with Chun Chun, who has enlisted her in his crunches, while Deng stretches discreetly in his corner, turning amused glances towards the fitness freaks. Li taps away at his computer. I know he’s curious about everything and, at the moment, especially the tango and how he could join my tanguero friend Camilo in Cali.

Tomorrow I start shooting with the dancers. We’re curious about each other.
I’ll give it a go in any case, in the abundant, slightly greyish light from the large picture window that opens onto the infinite monstrosity of Chengdu’s skyscrapers.
I’m surrounded by twenty million others who go about their work with absolute indifference to what’s going on in this studio where, as in many other places in the world, women and men, most of them young, feel the need to express with their bodies something of their human condition that words fail to pronounce.

PORTRAITS

I think of the Fayum portraits, of their frontal beauty, of that ‘look of the dead’ whose life force reaches us down the centuries.
How little the millions of pixels of my camera weigh compared to the untouched power of encaustic and linen, of gilding and beeswax, of sycamore fig wood! 

Whatever, I’m doing it because I want to and I need to.

What will they tell me tomorrow? Will they give me their intimate truth?
Or will they offer me the lie of their most beautiful mask?

I have to be there and take it all in, seize the true grace of the moment.