The heartbreaking offering of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui in Moroccan culture

Ihsane It's an Arabic word that reflects a spiritual ideal of kindness and altruism. In Arabic, words are vague concepts, "nomadic thoughts," a dancer tells us, translated into Catalan; as are the sinuous forms of its writing, drawn on the walls of a Koranic school where a teacher has students and the audience repeat words, followed by a dance of undulating arms like calligraphy in a hypnotic scene.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui Thus begins the emotional journey of reunion with his father, a Moroccan emigrant in Belgium, and with his childhood in Tangier, a diptych that completes the tribute to his mother's flamenco culture in Vlaemsch (to me). Cherkaoui invites us to participate in the communion established by the excellent dancers of the Ballet of the Grand Théâtre de Genève and the Eastman company, four musicians and two singers who break down traditional poems and songs that deal with loss, identity, and reconciliation, especially in the astonishing pas de deux of the reunion between father and son. We enjoy a festive and luminous past amidst curtains, doors worked with arabesques, carpets with geometric designs, silver teapots, and floral ornaments with group dances of fluid, delicate, original, and poetic movements, which gradually darken towards an increasingly present.

The scene of the beating and murder of Ihsane Jarfi, a young homosexual of Moroccan origin killed in Liège in 2012, is shocking and moving, with a delicate yet brutal choreography that opens the door to reflect on racism and homophobia; how brutally violent is the sequence in which a dancer's throat is cut in an allegory of the slaughter of the lamb that stains everything with blood. Video images of bloody hands drift towards the Palestinian flag and a sea of blood in a world of war and destruction where all immigrants who have not been swallowed by the sea will die buried under their own carpets.

Possibly, this is Sidi Larbi's darkest and harshest show, which, with exquisite sensitivity, only redeems us with a funeral ceremony of impressive beauty, with women emerging from oriental tales flooding the stage with oil lamps while the dancers pass Ihsane oil, placed in a huge bucket of mashrabiya that rises towards the ceiling and from where the sand falls, which, like the calligraphy tattooed on the dancers' bodies, unites us all.