A love from Guadeloupe
Coming from Guadeloupe, one of the French Lesser Antilles, specifically from its capital Pointe-à-Pitre, is the choreographer Chantal Loïal, whom we have known and seen dance repeatedly in the graceful Montalvo-Hervieu company.
But this time, Chantal presents nationally for the first time her group, Difé Kako, founded in Paris in 1994, and a piece, "Aski Parè" (which debuted in France last January), explicating her tireless and passionate work in disseminating the folkloric tradition, including music, from the Antilles and Africa.
Unlike many protagonists of contemporary choreography today, Chantal does not aim to highlight or amalgamate cultural differences, opposing ways of dancing, or reflecting on daily experiences with the spirit of ecumenical globalization that also had historical roots in ballet, especially in France (think of Maurice Béjart).
Despite navigating with extreme professionalism among many diverse contemporary French companies (such as Jérôme Deschamps', for example) and learning the value of slowness, silence, and the nuances of even the most infinitesimal movements — "in the Antilles, dance is fast and energetic, folklore is a cataclysm that must never bore the audience," she says — Chantal Loïal prefers to revive at each performance (having crafted about a dozen to date, all warmly received in the parades of the Antilles and Martinique Carnival) the spirit of "léwoz," a type of celebration understood as a family gathering of dance and percussive music typical of the Antilles, dating back to slavery times.
Certainly, in the subject of "Aski Parè" — the story of female frustration in the aftermath of a love affair — and in its stripped-down staging, we recognize more than one connection with European dance. A chair (how many chairs populated Béjart's 1940s choreography or Pina Bausch's dance-theatre?) marks the absence of the desired man in a lucid and at times fierce chronicle of abandonment. Loïal enriches her "Aski Parè" with Western choreographic subtleties. Five performers, among whom the choreographer does not appear, dance and sing their pain, sublimating their suffering in an attempt to rise again. The passion of the movement, combined with the power of percussion, the nostalgia of the accordion, and the scratch of the bass-guitar (all the music specially created revisits the traditional repertoire of Africa and the Antilles), pulverizes the negativity of the end of a love to give birth to a possible new beginning.
