Corbeaux by Bouchra Ouizguen & Compagnie O - Santarcangelo festival 2016

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 rythm, singing with tempo-less voices, stopping and 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. At Santarcangelo, Compagnie O, the Marrakech dance group that came together during eight years of laboratory and performance work directed by Ouizguen, is being joined by women living in the local area. As in every town to which the “murder of crows” migrates in order to bring their song to public spaces, so here too in Santarcangelo, local women have been invited to join in the performance, with the result that about thirty women, took part in a workshop in May in which, overcoming the barriers of age and origin, as well as language barriers, they exchanged their personal histories. Now they are ready, each through her own ancestral cawing, urgent and brutal, painful yet crazily joyful, to convey their feminine knowledge, bursting into the everyday spaces of the town and bowling the spectators over with their own cathartic rites before leaving them facing themselves once more.