Bouchra Ouizguen, Compagnie O, Corbeaux

Bouchra Ouizguen, Corbeaux, Serpentine Pavilion, July 14

Bouchra Ouizguen’s Compagnie O in Corbeaux (photo: Hasnae El Ouarga)

The idea of performing Bouchra Ouizguen‘s dark, brooding Corbeaux (crows) as part of this year’s Shubbak Festival in Francis Kéré’s light, airy 2017 Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens is a symbiotic one. Kéré conceived the structure with its curved blue walls made of stacked triangular assemblies of timber and an orange canopy roof as an ‘architectural version of a big tree’ in Gando, his home town in Burkina Faso, where villagers would use its shade as a locus for activities. Both the Pavilion and Ouizguen’s choreography are a form of gathering; Kéré has built a congenial space for people to congregate in the heart of London, while Ouizguen has built a work for an outside space inspired by the collective behaviour of crows. The audience assembles like villagers underneath Kéré’s tree, standing with their backs to its airy walls, watching Ouizguen’s women — ten Moroccan performers and eight London-based — enter slowly, one by one at intervals in the dark. Once in place, they perch upright in triangular patterns in relation to each other and to the audience. Dressed in black with white headscarves, they stand motionless with eyes closed until the last woman joins the group. The stillness and silence are then suddenly broken by an eruption of visceral chanting wrenched from the abdomen up to the throat of each woman. It is not age but experience that shows in their faces and a fierce insistence that drives the rhythmic pulse of their gestures. They remain rooted to the same spot throughout this atavistic ritual and it is the subtle differences in the power these women generate in their gestures that attune our eyes to ‘hear’ the force of their voices.

Based on early Persian literature, the performance shares the investment in repetitive movement typical of Sufi dance in an attempt to transcend physicality by fully embracing and expressing corporeality. Here Ouizguen’s performers achieve a similar effect through harnessing the repetition of their piercing, guttural cries with the physical rocking forwards and backwards of their heads and necks. Some of the women accent the outbreath and others the inbreath to effect a see-saw rippling of sound that ricochets against the bodies of the audience with contrapuntal force. After twenty minutes, following a hidden pattern of quietus, the performers slowly one by one come to rest till only one continues the wild, rhythmic chant and movement which finally subsides to stillness and silence like the undulations of a pebble on the surface of a lake. Once the surface has settled the women drift out into the night but leave their emotional presence carved into the space of Kéré’s pierced walls.

This is it. There is no narrative, barely a beginning and no apparent end. We are engulfed in sound and the physical force that produces it, like being overtaken by a storm that suddenly arises out of nowhere, expends its energy and moves on; it is closer to nature than to theatre. Ouizguen has stated that Corbeaux is not so much a spectacle but an escape from the traditional mode of production for the stage. “I envisioned Marrakech station with this flock of ageless crows, like a living event, a sonorous sculpture whose power and urgency flows to infinity.” Perhaps Kéré had not envisioned such a gathering under his tree-like pavilion and neither, perhaps, had Ouizguen imagined such a genial space to be the setting of her brooding, sonorous sculpture but it was a bold feat of imagination to put the two together and let them play off each other’s life-affirming qualities.

This UK première of Corbeaux was presented by Shubbak as part of Park Nights, the Serpentine Pavilion’s annual series of summer events in partnership with Serpentine Galleries and Tate Modern.