Midwest Premiere | FREE |
Performance Dates:
Saturday, September 16 - 3:00PM: Contemporary Arts Center and 7:00PM: Findlay Market Farmshed |
Sunday, September 17 - 7:30PM: Yeatman's Cove, beneath the Purple People Bridge
In her work Corbeaux (‘crows’ or ‘ravens’), Moroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizgen offers us an experience of immense intensity outside of a traditional theatre space. Out of the dark emerge figures dressed in black. Like birds they step forward, their heads wrapped in white headscarves that droop like beaks. They dance in an hypnotic rhythm, singing with tempo-less voices, resting, then restarting. They undertake physical and vocal actions ranging from repetitions to variations, swelling up until they explode in the form of a vital, earthy cry from the womb.
Bouchra Ouizguen’s crows are women of different languages, cultures and origins. With the CAC, Compagnie O, the Marrakech dance group that came together during eight years of laboratory and performance work directed by Ouizguen, will be joined by women living in Greater Cincinnati. As in every town to which Corbeaux migrates, this collection of women is freed of the barriers of age, origin, and language, exchanging their personal histories in this shared commitment. They assemble to convey their feminine knowledge, bursting into the everyday spaces of the city and bowling the spectators over with their own cathartic rites before leaving them facing themselves once more.
Originally created for the 2014 Marrakech Biennale of Contemporary Art, Corbeaux has since been presented throughout Europe and West Asia, appearing at some of the world’s foremost contemporary arts centers and performance festivals. Wherever it goes, each venue is uniquely specific to the environment, and the public is never far away.
“We saw these women; of all ages, of all sizes, and of all origins, united in the same movement… It is striking.”
– Le Monde
Support for the US tour of Corbeaux is provided by the French Institute in Paris (Institut Français à Paris); the French-US Exchange in Dance, a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project; the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States; and FACE Foundation, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Florence Gould Foundation, and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. Additional support provided by the Hermès Foundation within the framework of the New Settings Program; This presentation is supported by the Arts Midwest Touring Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from the Ohio Arts Council and the Crane Group; and the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati.
Duration: 40 minutes
Concept, Artistic Direction: Bouchra Ouizguen
Compagnie O: Kabboura Aït Ben Hmad, Fatima El Hanna, Halima Sahmoud, Fatna Ibn El Khatyb, Khadija Amrhar, Zahra Bensllam, Malika Soukri, Hasnae El Ouarga, Milouda El Maataoui
Tour Manager : Mylène Gaillon
Production Compagnie O // Co-production Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle de l’Ambassade de France in Rabat, with the support of the French Institute in Marrakech.
Originally created in February 2014 for the Marrakech Contemporary Art Biennial.
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