"Programmers must open up the doors to us" notes Leila Haddad who has just filled six days in a row the Trianon theatre on Rochechouart Boulevard. In Zikrayat (memory), she pays a tribute to the singer Oum Kalsoum. This creation bears the name of a poem written by Ahmed Rami: “This poet wrote more than 200 songs for the one who inspired him so much!” reminds us the choreographer who on stage is surrounded by eight female dancers and one male dancer. Together they tell a story about Oriental dance, wrongly named “belly dance” by Napoleon’s legionnaires upon their return from Egypt, taking one part as the whole, a very male way of considering the female body. We shall not be too hard on them …Especially that the worse problems this famous dance had came from the inside. As a matter of interest: in 1834, pasha Mehmet Ali exiles 400 dancers in Upper Egypt; in 1955 President Nasser demands that the belly button be hidden. Little by little, the dance doesn’t go out of the context of family celebrations, locks itself, always by fear of being put into the same category as prostitution. We know that currently in Egypt, dancers must obtain a licence from the vice squad depending on the Ministry of the Interior.

“When I see three women wearing the veil in the theatre like Sunday at the afternoon performance, I feel like crying and going right away to Couronnes (a Parisian suburb) wearing a bikini” says Leila Haddad who was born in Djerba, Tunisia. She as well had to argue seriously to have her family understand that by dancing in theatres, and not in cabarets, she was fighting with pride to have her culture recognized. She participates in all symposiums and is invited worldwide to perform solo dancing.

Shared Vision
The first part of Zikrayat derives from musicals with bright-coloured costumes, multicoloured veils and bodies clad up to the chin. Leila Haddad reveals her game with distance and humour. Up to the moment where she starts a very long, very beautiful solo in which she shows with an immense pleasure how from her tiptoes to the point of her hair she moves every inch of her body, including each mini-muscle of her belly.

This way of sending rhythm from one place to another to such an extent that one can follow the course without any difficulty, exposes the female body in all its mobile richness. Observing dance inching its way on and under the skin constitutes by itself “a georhythmics of the world, from Asia to Europe” says Bernard RÈmy of the CinÈmathËque de la Danse (The Dance Film Library).

Leila Haddad knows up to what extent her desire to make culture live freely is never won. “I know how much I have to wrap up my dance in an intellectual speech that legitimates it in order to impose it. I do not always have that time.” Yet having followed the dancer’s work for almost twenty years and now looking at the Trianon theatre jam-packed with a great majority of women, we think to ourselves that her artistic engagement is not vain.

Dominique Frétard