Walker Art Center presents
Nacera Belaza
L’Onde (The Wave)
Friday–Saturday, October 27 & 28, 2023
8:00 pm
McGuire Theater

L'Onde (The Wave)
Choreography/Sound/Light Design by NACERA BELAZA
Performers:
NACERA BELAZA, PAULIN BANC, MOHAMMED ECH CHARQUAOUY, OCÉANE VALENCE
Technical Management:
CHRISTOPHE RENAUD
Production:
NACERA BELAZA COMPANY
Coproduction:
Kunstenfestivaldesarts / Charleroi danse, centre chorégraphique de Wallonie-Bruxelles Festival de Marseille
deSingel - Campus International des Arts
MC93 Bobigny
LUMA Foundation, ICI – Centre chorégraphique national Montpellier-Occitanie, directed by Christian Rizzo, as part of the research and creation residencies programme
L’Arsenal Cité musicale Metz
Atelier de Paris / CDCN
The company has benefited from the support of the LUMA Arles foundation residency program as well as by the Ile-de-France region as part of the Aide à la creation programme. Additional support by SACD as part of the duo programme; Institut français – Ville de Paris; SPEDIDAM.
The U.S. tour of Nacera Belaza is part of the Albertine Dance Season.
Nacera Belaza extends her deep respect and appreciation to Northern Cree for allowing their singing and drumming to be shared in the production of L’Onde. CMT was composed by Shane Dion, Marlon Deschamps, and Conan Yellowbird and performed by Northern Cree. Courtesy Canyon Records. Published by DMG Arizona (ASCAP). Northern Cree, Treaty 6 Territory, also known as the Northern Cree Singers, is a powwow and Round Dance drum and singing group, based in Maskwacis, Alberta, Canada. Formed in 1982 by the Wood brothers; Steve, Randy, Charlie and Earl Wood of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, all members originate from the Treaty 6 and are members of the Cree Nation, unless otherwise noted (Saddle Lake Band, Samson Band, Louis Bull Band, Frog Lake Band, Onion Lake Band, Sweetgrass Band, Poundmaker Band, Sunchild Band, Menominee Nation). Click HERE for more information on Northern Cree, or HERE to order their latest recording Ôskimacîtahowin: A New Beginning (2022).
Program
The Franco-Algerian choreographer explores the ancient rituals that have permeated her work until now. Being and infinity, the spinning of space and time, and the letting go at the origin of self-transcendence come to haunt this unique dance that awakens a fundamental pulse and moving images revived from ancient times.
I feel that my entire career is like a straight line. Each of my pieces is a milestone on a straight path, without deviation. When you deviate, you know it, you feel it. It seems to me that the artist must oppose this with all their strength. The line that connects two points is necessarily taut, without respite. One and the same intention that one repeats tirelessly, and it is on oneself that one is actually working.
–Nacera Belaza

Learn More
“Nacera Belaza, a French-Algerian dancer and choreographer, is concerned with authenticity. She is a choreographer in some of the most stereotypical ways you would imagine–charismatic and animated, she has a vision for what realness might look like and is unyieldingly demanding of the dancers with whom she works. She makes dances for the stage, which, although spare and darkly lit, center on the moving body. She is also a choreographer in an elemental, even spiritual way. She attempts to arrange bodies in space to enact, in her words, something real, to tap into a kind of sacred communion. In this process, she urges the conceptual innards of those dancing bodies–their motivations, fears, notions of selfhood–to fall away. She requires complete and uninhibited transformation.”
Nora Rain Thompson
The following is an excerpt of an article published in the Fall 2023/2024 issue of Movement Research Journal, featuring a 2022 conversation between performance writer, dance-maker, and performer Nora Rain Thompson (NRT) and Nacera Belaza (NB):
NRT: I have been thinking about my experience with you in 2020. Being in your work felt like a strange opportunity to attempt the impossible, and it triggered a whole set of questions for me that now are beginning to impact my scholarly work. I’m thinking about all sorts of impossible tasks, especially those, like yours, that I have found simultaneously frustrating, complicated, and compelling. Do you think of your work in this way? With this sense of impossibility?
NB: It’s funny you use that word, because back in 2010 I wrote something about always asking the dancer to do something impossible. I do believe that what I set up is possible, though; let’s say we can’t perfectly reach it. There is something interesting in the process, then. The transformation of your mind and your body while you are going from this point to another creates the work. We get to see how everything gets transformed by this action of trying to reach something impossible. For example, I’m sure I gave you this image before, because I use it in rehearsal: if you say to a child, “Come, run and jump and touch the second-"oor window!” He’s not going to think about how he’s going to do it, and he’s going to run and jump. And he’s going to believe that it’s possible. So the way that he organizes his body and mind will give us the sensation that he reached the goal, even though he didn’t. But the grown person, they already have a kind of plan in mind, which is: I know it’s impossible, so I’m gonna pretend to do it. When they pretend, they inverse the organization. Dancers pretend a lot, and for me, when they pretend, there’s nothing interesting happening.
NRT: I want to know what drives you to attempt to do the task in performance, in front of people? Even when, by performing on a stage, it almost forces you to pretend. Why take that risk?
NB: People have asked me this before: why would I go onstage if I don’t want to perform? I do it because I think we can be differently onstage. We can share something else besides a performance. It’s a bigger communion. Having the audience on my mind always makes me feel that it has to be real—as real for them as it is for me…The stage was made to show people what you can do. This remains in the back of our minds when we step onto stage, thinking we must hold on to something to show the audience. But take this thought away and the ten meters of the stage becomes an infinite space! The moments in my life where I have touched that space are bigger than everything… I think I still have the courage and the energy to go onstage, just because I want to touch those moments again.
NRT: There is a physical danger in letting go that allows for that communion. There’s risk involved in trying to get to these amazing boundless states because it is in those places, I think, that I find myself feeling like I could disintegrate into nothing. I have asked myself, how do I open up and let go and surrender completely, without hurting myself? I know you are here, you’ve made it, so how do you negotiate that risk?
NB: Yes, it’s a fine line between transcendence and spiritual experience, and just taking the risk on its own. The risk is part of the experience, but it’s not the goal. I’m not taking risks just to take risks. I have to take the risk in order to go further. This is how it works. Otherwise, my fear takes over.
NRT: I have noticed how much darkness and blurriness there is in your work. I almost would describe it as “edgelessness.” But there are edges, there are boundaries that are essential. Even though there’s this feeling of boundlessness –
NB: You have to put a frame there, a delimitation. You have to say, inside this space, I will let go. By combining the fall and the infinite, you extend your consciousness on those two levels, which will keep you from hitting a wall, or someone else. You can’t just close your eyes and let go. Your consciousness can throw an invisible thread into the space, a measure. That’s how, even though I make pieces where performers could hurt themselves, they usually don’t…
…I did not set out to work on transcendence. I just decided to try something, and it grew from there. It doesn’t work if you want it too much. For instance, I worked with this dancer who wanted the transcendence and freedom so badly, and she wasn’t getting it. But one week before the performance, she got the bad news that her father-in-law died. So, she asked to leave for a couple days and then return before the performance. I don’t fight against life, so I said of course. Just go. When she came back, I knew before we even performed that she was going to be right in it. I knew it. It’s like a frequency that you catch. Mastering is probably something like that in my work, looking for a frequency. How do you say that, looking for a frequency? You have to tune yourself and find that precise place. And with my work, it is always hard to understand why it’s happening now and not before…When the dancer experienced the death of her father in-law, it brought her to a new place where the performance part gets kind of pushed back. It’s not the primary goal anymore, not the first thing on your mind because you have just gone through a very intense and real human experience. So, then she was in it as a human.
NRT: I think what can cause resistance is the way fear has often been cultivated for good reason. Resistance exists because resistance has been necessary for survival in this world. This world is not infinite space, it is not hospitable. So, if we’re living in that world where the fear is vital and trained, it feels endlessly complex to try to even look at that fear.
NB: I think that is why each person must take on the responsibility of it, instead of wondering how someone else will push the fear out of you. You have to know you’ll have the strength or energy.
NRT: They each have to find their own way.
NB: Yeah, it’s a human thing.
Excerpted from the article “Fragile Fall,” published in Movement Research Performance Journal #58/59 Summer/Fall 2023. For more information or to subscribe online visit:
www.movementresearch.org/performance_journal/subscriptions.
Accessibility notes
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About the Artist
NACERA BELAZA was born in Medea, Algeria. She moved to France at the age of 5. After receiving a literature degree, she founded her own dance company in 1989. Self-taught, she entered dance driven by the necessity to express herself and unravel the complexity of a dual cultural background. Her language emerged from her confined body, somehow imprisoned by cultural constraints during childhood and adolescence, drawing first from inner material, and later on from literature.
"To free yourself," says Belaza, "you have to be right, accurate, and precise. You have to defy complacency and seduction." What Nacera Belaza is indeed choreographing is an inner journey. It’s about space, the inner emptiness, it’s about light and shadow, repetition, and vertigo. Dance becomes an introspective vertical dive. Her movements are animated by a deep, serene and continuous breath, relying on patience, rigor and simplicity to face “the deafening din of our existences." In her work, Belaza tries to give back to gesture its existential role.
Her work, recognized and praised by the French Ministry of Culture, earned her the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2015. In France, Nacera Belaza was awarded the Syndicat de la Critique Prize for her piece Le Cri and the SACD Choreographic Prize in 2017. In 2021, she was named one of the 100 Women of Culture by the French association Femmes de Culture.
Nacera Belaza is associate artist to the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris and the MC93 in Bobigny. She regularly tours in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America, performing in prestigious festivals and venues such as the Avignon Festival or the Lyon Dance Biennale in France, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels and DeSingel in Antwerp, the Vidy Theatre in Lausanne, Crossing the Line festival in New York, and the Push festival in Vancouver. She has also been regularly working in Algeria, developing training, residency, and touring programs.