In this episode, NCCAkron's Executive/Artistic Director, Christy Bolingbroke enters the 'studio' with Guillaume Gabriel, cofounder of French company, Companie Hervé Koubi. The company’s work was born from a mixture of techniques and influences, at the crossroads of urban dances and ballet and with the coming together of Koubi’s French-Algerian and African family history.
In this episode, NCCAkron's Executive/Artistic Director, Christy Bolingbroke enters the 'studio' with Guillaume Gabriel, cofounder of French company, Companie Hervé Koubi. The company’s work was born from a mixture of techniques and influences, at the crossroads of urban dances and ballet and with the coming together of Koubi’s French-Algerian and African family history.
INTRODUCTION: Thanks for joining us Inside the Dancer’s Studio where we bring listeners, like you, closer to the creative process. Inside the Dancer’s Studio is a program of The National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron, as part of our Ideas in Motion initiative. This episode was recorded in the presence of a live audience in February of 2020. Today we join Christy Bolingbroke, our Executive / Artistic Director in conversation with Guillaume Gabriel, cofounder of French company, Companie Hervé Koubi. The company’s work was born from a mixture of techniques and influences, at the crossroads of urban dances and ballet and with the coming together of Koubi’s French-Algerian and African family history.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Tell us a little bit more about what is your role or creative relationship with Company Hervé Koubi?
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Basically I’m the cofounder of the company.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Ok.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: So we created the company 20 years ago by now, and for the 20, for the 10 first years of the company, we were a contemporary dance company working on several, several projects with, with always behind our heads the need to find our roots. The very beginning of the company, we were working with the traditional musics from the center of France. After there was always a need of belonging to what part of the world do we belong and what is our place as an artist, as a choreographer, and where do we come from to better know ourselves and maybe to better know where we could go? And on that process, at the age of 25, Hervé Koubi so the, the choreographer learned that, from his parents, that he was not from France, but from Africa. That was…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Twist!
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Shock. Yes, twist and shock. Hervé is really a French name. Koubi, it’s not a French name. And, it’s not like Dupont, or Gerard, or Macron which are really French. And he knew that his parents were born in Africa, they were born in Nigeria, but you know there has, there has been a long story between France and Africa with colonization and decolonization and independency and, but, as he has white skin with the prickled, prickles…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Freckles.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Freckles, yes. So it was like from Britain, he’s like from North of Europe. And at the age of 25, he asked his father where do we come from, where Koubi comes from, and that day his father showed to Hervé a picture. And on that picture there was a man all dressed in traditional Arabic style with a pants and turban and whatever. And he said, ‘this man is your great grandfather and he was only speaking one language, it was not French, it was Arabic. And it’s the same thing from on your mother’s side.’ So he was not from Brittany, but he was from Africa. So we decide to go to, to Africa to, in that idea of belonging, of roots, and because it was also important for him to know where he was actually coming from. And but we, we didn’t want to go there only to go in the streets or to see the houses, or the tombs, or no. We want to go deeper in our job in choreography.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Not just as a tourist.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Yes, so we, we called some French institutes in the United States and in Algeria. And they told us, we asked them, do you know where we could find dancers? Is there a dance schools, or companies, or whatever? And we've been told there are no dancers in Algeria, good luck. Well, that was the thing. We decided to go, however, and we managed to find very little addresses, email addresses, five. So we send an email to these people and we say we would like to meet you and maybe if you have friends and we would like to start the process of something with dancers from Algeria. And the day of the casting there were 250 people.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Oh! Of the, the Algerian dances.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Of Algerian dancers. So there are dancers in Algeria, but they are not dancers as we were, we, we could imagine from Europe, they were not contemporary dancers, they were not classical dancers, they were not trained dancers. They were self-trained dancers.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: They had a…
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: They were more dancers from the streets. Like hip hop or capoeira, or most of them learned dance through internet.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: A social form.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: And so we had our contemporary language, contemporary way of doing things, of creating movements, of using space, of writing also the choreography. And we had a new raw materials, with new raw dancers that we wanted to do something all together. But it was not forecast, was not planned. And for extent before the company we used to work with female and male dancers, and the day of that casting we only had boys.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: 250 male dancers.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Yeah, well, 299 males, and one girl. But the thing, well, we, we did, so that first project, which is called ‘What the Day Owes to the Night,’ which will be presented tomorrow in the plan.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: At Playhouse Square.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: And the, the idea that we wanted to work with those dancers was in a certain way to put movement and images on all these orient dreams. Orientalistic dreams. He was dreaming of his Algeria, so it was a way for him to put it in dance, in movement. So ‘What the Day Owes to the Night’ is the first part of that process with dancers from, from Algeria, from Africa, from, and later from the whole Mediterranean Basin. Because ‘What the Day Owes to the Night’ is the first step and after always in that idea of belonging, of roots, I told you that Hervé had freckles on, and he said, ‘why my skin is like that? It’s not a North African skin.’ So he, he went more for the second project, which is called ‘The Barbarian Nights’ in, in that idea of the global history of all the Mediterranean Basin. So ‘What the Day Owes to the Night’ is his point of view upon his own history. And ‘The Barbarian Nights,’ he’s a, from more, from a…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: A broader context.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Yes, yes. Of all the huge history of all those people coming and crossing and mixing and meeting and fighting or wedding or, of those mixes of cultures, of religions, of, that in a certain way, are the, the basis on which we are standing in Europe and in North Africa and all the Mediterranean Basin.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: It sounds that the, the creative inspiration for each work is still deeply personal. Are there other things that inspire Hervé? Does, is it, what is the, is there research like reading or is it coming from a place of, ‘I love this music.’ Like, what else inspires this is the next piece?
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: For ‘The Barbarian Nights,’ for, for ‘What the Day Owes to the Night,’ the, the main inspiration was the painting. Paintings of Delacoix. Of Ang, of all the Orientalistic painters of the 18th century. He, he took the same process as those painters, as those artists at moment, you know in the, in the at, at the end of, in the beginnings of the 19th century, in the 18 and something with the colony and everything, there was a huge dream of what were the colonies. And…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: They didn’t have the internet then.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: No.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yeah.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: So it was dreams, it was phantasms also, fancies, it was just like aura, how can it be?And Hervé wanted to use the same process. So he, he, he was very much inspired of paintings, of Delacroix, of Ang also, so maybe you can see the show you will have, maybe find ok, that maybe make me think of that painting, on it. And we also were inspired of the Arabic calligraphy, all those movements and so this was the basis to create the movement. And together there are lot of movements like, like that as if they were writing on the, on, onstage. Also some ideas of Hammam, of general habits also in North of Africa, the relationship, the, the brotherhood and the relationship that you can experience between male, of people of the same sex in, in North of Africa. It’s very natural for male to hold their hands and walk and grabbing each other, it’s not, absolutely not connoted like sexuality or whatever. It’s just like brotherhood and they, they touch and they grab and, yeah, it’s really normal. So that, that was a part of giving a point of view on that culture, the culture that he dreamt, he dreamt and, and you know with that, ‘What the Day Owes to the Night.’ Hervé used to say that with that show he, and with those people, he better found himself. He better knew himself. And he found in a certain way his found brothers. Some, some maybe a tragic vision is, you know when the Hervé’s parents came back from Algeria to France, they thought they were, they would have been welcome in France. Every, all, all, all those people thought they would have been welcomed and, but that was not the case. There was kind of strange feeling, they were French, but they were not welcome anymore in France. So I for, for him it was a bit difficult to, to understand the way that his parents erased all the, all the, all the past. Because he knew at 25 that he was from African roots. So during 25 years, his parents hide him that his real roots because he wanted him to be more French, then the French would be…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Well, and fast-forwarding 10 years from that moment, you and Hervé have brought many of those dancers from Algeria to France, correct? I mean, have helped them emigrate now and how, how big is the company?
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Some of them, well, they, they all came to France, they worked in France.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Not all 299 of them?
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: No.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Ok, just checking.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: No. Now the company’s, it depends on the project, but it, between 17 and 20 dancers on the projects.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: That, that’s a lot of family. Yeah.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Yeah, yes.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: I, I wanted to dig into process a little bit. How would you characterize the relationship to music or sound in the creation of new work?
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: It’s, there are several dimensions of music. There is the music as, as a sense of, for ‘What the Day Owes to the Night’ and even for ‘The Barbarian Nights,’ we, we wanted to use music from both sides of the Mediterranean Basin because we wanted to talk about the, all the, the mix and combination of these cultures. And for us, music is real connected with culture on ‘What the Day Owes to the Night,’ there is a part of the past show from, from Bach, St. John's Special, so this is really a Christian music, there is also Sufi music and there is also contemporary music, which links and mix everything as a vessel from going between the cultures and there is also the absence sometimes of music. The silence, silence is important also for us who, to emphasize the music of the does. Nothing is really counted.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Right.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: The most important is to be together, to make body with the music and to dance together, the, the one of the major important things in the company is we want dancers to be together. There is no first dancer or there is no…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Hierarchy that you might find in a ballet company.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: No, no. There is no, I think the most important is at every show we try to, again, find this, this magical thing of being together and to find and to create the new possibilities of always making something new. It’s really boring when you have a dancers and he says, ‘I’ve been doing this for so many times and I will do it forever.’ This is not the thing that we want to, want to always. Even if everything is very well-written, the most important is not to, to do but is to be onstage.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: And even just the little bit I got to see of you teaching class, I was struck and remarking to some the, the lack of counts also seemed to not be, to be non-hierarchical. That you weren’t beholden to the music, to hear you describe it, it feels more cinematic, as if you’re scoring a film instead of at we’re, we’re dancing to the music and it’s dictating what happens next. But this idea of brotherhood, and if I were to then interpret that term as a spirit or sense of community, and the, what you were coaching was how to dance together without needing the counts to dictate how you would stay together. But there, this idea of, you know, being aware of who’s running on this side of you, or whose doing this on this side of you. And I absolutely recall, like, that experience cause the, there is a lot of rhythm in the performance, but it is the sense of how the dancers take care of each other, how, when, if you have someone who is literally spinning on their head, what I always enjoy is seeing how they come out of it. And there’s usually someone who also steadies them because they might be a little bit dizzy. And, and just taking care of each other instead of just saying you do your part and I’m gonna do my part and then that’s, that’s just it, but it’s like, ‘oh no, we’re here making this community together.’ And that, that’s very present. So I was fascinated to hear that about, you know, where music factors into it. Cause some people start with music in their practice. I’m also curious what do you and Hervé do when you’re in a rut? You know, do you ever get to that point where you’re like, ‘I don’t know what to do next.’ And then yet you have 17 dancers who are like, ‘ok, what are we doing today?’
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: We are, I think we’re never in that state of…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Not yet?
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: No.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Ok.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: We have about five or six new projects behind our heads.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: That’s good, that’s good, that’s excellent.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: So, heavy. And that, that there are, you know, we, we live for what we do, what we want to share and we are always filled with actuality. Also with news, with, with what’s happening. And in France at this moment there is weird, some weird things with immigration and, and…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: That sounds familiar.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Yeah, and it’s, and maybe more, more in people are more on themselves and if there is someone who doesn’t talk like you, or doesn’t pray like you, or maybe that could be suspicious. So we are in the middle of a, I think it’s a bit, a sick society and we can’t stay without doing anything. So we are always trying to, to concern people with what it is to live together and to try to better know each others. To, it’s, it’s, it was the beginning of, of the company I told you we were, we wanted to better knew, know us. And I think that if people would better know each others, I think they would understand more and more one another.And, you, you know, that was something interesting, one day Hervé used to present the show before. And at this moment in France, you have Muslims and you have Jews and you have Christians and, and there is no mixity. And even if, if you go in certain places this is even more…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Segregated.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Yes, yes. And Hervé’s mother is Musilim and Hervé’s father is Jewish. And usualyl he presnts the, the show before, to, to, to the audience and he, one day he say that in, in the audience they were young kids, teenagers and for them it was impossible to have one Muslim and one Jewish and that they could marry.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Wow.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: So, I think we have a big work to do, and this is the, the message that we want to share with our shows. So we have done lot of ideas behind and also at the same time we, we have also ideas of the choreographical work that we are working on.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: I was gonna say that it is fascinating to hear about the sociopolitical issues that, that resonate and matter to you as artists. At the same time, the work is highly physical, entertaining even, and I’m curious how do y’all, my Texan comes out, how do both of you, are, define virtuosity?
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: It shouldn’t be seen as something virtuo…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Virtuous, yeah.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: It, it’s we, we, when we started to work with those dancers…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Cause it could become trick after trick after trick. But you’ve found a way to sort of navigate that.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Yeah. You know, when we met those dancers, there was a huge need to express themselves. To ex, an explosion of movement, a really spring of energy and, and that was the way they wanted to shout something. And for us, all those acrobatics, and, you can’t do it half. If you jump and you, you fall. So you really have to be committed in that movement. So it’s a way of shouting, of going really with all your body, it’s like the, all the least and all the, you really have to trust one another when you are jumping and the other one receives you. This, this is part of the, of the message that we want to express. We want to say it loud. And we, we, if, if you, if you, we want if, if we do something we have to do it but 100% is the minimum. So it’s, it’s not a quest of virtuosity, but it’s more to use the movement to express something, to, just to be in connection with what they, what they are, and what intent is the message that we want to, want to share with the audience. And being we, we, we are not just circus…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: No.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Members.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: It’s not for audience appeal.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: No, it’s, it’s, it’s part of, you know sometimes you, you catch the, the, the, you catch the ideas to say what we are going to say is this, it’s, it’s important because it’s part of our society. And yes, that, that’s the, I, I would say also we love those movements.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Of course!
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: But that’s also because they come from the dancers. And, it’s part of what they have to say. And this is a way to concern the dancers in, in the show. We, we were trained as classic, classical or contemporary dancers and our idea was not to teach them to be contemporary dancers.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Right.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: We wanted to let them express and let them be within our way of building the choreography. So it’s, it’s, if they are part of expression. It’s their part of being themselves in that, all that acrobatic things. You know, for instance, one day of rehearsal, it starts with the, one hour of technical contemporary yoga, Feldenkrais class.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Ok.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: And after for one hour we lead the dancers in their training techniques, and they find again, and this is, I think, the part of how to dance together. When they, when they learned how to dance, they were teaching each others. That was building the group, that was building their dance community.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: That also breaks down that hierarchy where it’s just the choreographer who does the teaching. They’re teaching each other.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Yes.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Interesting.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: And this is what we want to keep in, in the company. So there is, how, way of moving, how all of what I told during the class, all the qualities that we want of how to breathe, how to…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Well, and now you’re talking about codifying these as a series of, of techniques or teaching practices. Do you want to maybe wrap us up and tell us a little bit about that?
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Yes, this is a kind of, the, is a bit what I am trying to explain you the, the mix of what we are, what they are, all the, the personal and individual researches and that we, we put together to make something new. And so for instance with that, this is important in the, I think, in the, the, the, if they would be one name of our, our, of what is the work of the company, it’s to dance together. With all that means, all the trust, all the, the respect of the, the techniques that one can bring and that one can bring, and the we, we are walking on the, on, on new technique because the idea is to better know us, to better know each others and to see what we can do. And the idea of the, we call it ART, Associated Researches Techniques.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Associated researches techniques.
GUILLAUME GABRIEL: Which is, I tell you to associate the individual earnings to put them together and to know how this techniques can be useful to express something. To express a subject, for instance the, the, the lack of, the, the, the, the way that you don’t know each others, or you, we have a subject that we will use this technique. This associated technique that we experience with our contemporary background and all the street dancing background and there is, I know that Hervé is really fond of all these rotations. The world is spinning and if you can see on the Sufi, this is in, in the, when you spin you, there is a, that reels a new dimension. So we are focusing on, on this spins and all these vertical, all the relationship with the, the floor, the vertical, and horizontal and even the jump and everything you. The jumps we use is our rotations also, you know, they’re not just jumping, but there are backflips or whatever. Dancers when they spin on their heads, when they spin on their hands, when they spins on their feet like classical dancers. They are all these spinning things that we are really focused on the ART technique and as you say you, what’s, what, what you, what you notice is, and we are really focused on it. It’s not the acrobatic that interests us, it’s ok what to do, but the most important is how you go in and, and you go out of it. So, and all these little before and after as, are, as much important as the middle in itself.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Very good. Please join me in thanking Guillaume Gabriel. Our next conversation will be on Monday here and Dr. Mark Ried will also introduce the conversation between Brian Brooks and myself, so we’ll start just after 12:15. Have a great Valentines Day and a happy weekend y’all. Thank you.
OUTRODUCTION: Inside the Dancer’s Studio lunchtime talk series is supported by NCCAkron, The University of Akron, The University of Akron Foundation, and the Mary Schiller Myers Lecture Series in the Arts. Our podcast program is produced by Jennifer Edwards, Ellis Rovin is our composer and editor, transcription by Madeline Greenberg, theme music by Floco Torres, cover art by Micah Kraus, and Julian Curet and Kat Wentz are our artist coordinators. To learn more about NCCAkron, please visit us online at nccakron.org and follow us on Instagram or Facebook @nccakron. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we encourage you to subscribe on your favorite podcast streaming platform by searching for Inside the Dancer’s Studio. Thank you for listening and stay curious.