Abstract
This doctoral thesis presents substantial academic research of the work of Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. When locating Cherkaoui’s work within Flemish dance history, his complex, transnational, and interdisciplinary choreographic practice challenges the existing historical narrative based on generations and geographical narrowness. A review of discourses on new dramaturgies yields a proposed new analytical methodology, one that begins to account for the continuous dramaturgy of the spectator by combining observation, conversation, spectatorship and writing. Away from the discursive focus on the role of the dramaturg in collaborative processes, this thesis explores the alternatives of dramaturgy as shared, interlocutionary, and permanent. The spectator’s engagement with the work’s content, imagery, aural landscape, stories, and poignant moments, is on-going beyond the performance moment, so that theatre can fulfil its potential for social change. The thesis exemplifies the diverging shapes that this continuous spectatorial dramaturgy may take in relation to cultural issues raised in Cherkaoui’s work, putting into practice the proposed methodology. Identity is choreographed as constructed, cosmopolitan and kaleidoscopic, destabilising undue emphasis on national identity in the context of the fracturing Belgian state and the Flemish populist radical right. Storytelling undergoes choreographic treatment in Cherkaoui’s work, impacting on perception and spectatorship, so that spectators might consider travel stories as transcultural and story as oral history, extending cultural exchange within an Appaduraian ‘modernity at large’. Cherkaoui carefully positions himself in the debates about religious fundamentalism, new totalitarianism and Islamophobia by choreographically negotiating the intertextuality of Holy texts and circumambulating the symbol of the cross, positing religion as myth. Cherkaoui’s heteroglossic dramaturgy of non-translation problematizes signification and notions of dramaturgy as mediation between artist and audience. Postcolonial critiques of translation allow for Cherkaoui’s rejection of the role of translator to be understood as giving rise to the continuous dramaturgy of the spectator as cross-cultural conversation.