The painted palm trees evoke the exotic fantasies of another time. In this spectacular scenography, a choreography emerges mixing rapid movements and unconventional rhythms danced by performers wearing mirror-clad costumes.
Their presence opens a space for invocation, exorcism, and celebration. This Art Deco temple recalls an era when Black and artists of colour had to don exotic costumes before being given a place on stage. By genuinely holding space and caring for who precedes them, the dancers on stage acquire the qualities of the hosted dancers, their agency, their agile and lithe movements, their own sleek dances, to gradually become the very dancers who are invited and called in as a long-awaited guest.
Summoning the re-appearance of ancestral forms of movement, then amounts to dancing with partially connected worlds, the different partially connected worlds that came before us. Born in Kurdistan, Leyla Bederkhan grew up in Cairo, where she got first acquainted with dance in the harem and the opera-house. Living in between Munich and Vienna, she studied dance and ballet and developed a practice that allowed her to go on tour in Europe and the USA, after which she founded her own dance school in the outskirts of Paris.
She left early to Paris to study dance and never came back to Mexico but invented a folkloric dance that was partly Brazilian and Spanish partly her own dance inspiration. Often associated with the Parisian cabaret tradition, the formats of vaudeville and revue showcased a diverse range of individual acts, at times loosely thematically integrated, mixing different genres and styles. Her proposition is different, as the dancers on stage evoke and host their spiritual ancestors, forgotten and invisibilized artists in the European canon, not to reinstate their legacy in the canon, but to abolish it.
They want to reappear and be remembered, undoing the violence of erasure. But together with those that came before them, the dancers on stage refuse to be reduced to a single being and turn the spectacle of vaudeville against itself. The invoked artists also worked with forms of ritual evocations, already hosting the reappearance of what came before them, allowing ancestral rhythms and ways of knowing, being and sensing the world otherwise to come to the fore.
