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ARTIST PORTRAIT: Roueida Ghali – Dance is a vibration, an impulse …

By Edgar Davidian, October 10, 2000

A young woman with a round belly. With grace, even pregnant, Roueida Ghali does not take a step away from the world of dance. She talks about it with volubility, vivacity and passion. Those who attended her show entitled Zone interdite, in the penultimate version of the Ayloul festival, can measure the originality and the extraordinary personality of this young choreographer with a mixed formation of dramatic art, refinements of butoh and of the secret elegance of the world of puppets…

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ARTIST PORTRAIT Roueida Ghali: Dance is a vibration, an impulse …
By DAVIDIAN Edgar , October 10, 2000 at 00:00

A young woman with a round belly. With grace, even pregnant, Roueida Ghali does not take a step away from the world of dance. She talks about it with volubility, vivacity and passion. Those who attended her show entitled Zone interdite, in the penultimate version of the Ayloul festival, can measure the originality and the extraordinary personality of this young choreographer with a mixed formation of dramatic art, refinements of butto and of the secret elegance of the world of puppets. Pretty variegated to express in terms of eloquence of the body the vision of the world and sometimes that of the woman. After four good years of fine arts studies at the Lebanese University, the assiduous attendance of the Lecoq school in Paris to master movements and gestures, a full-fledged training in Russia, in Karasnadar, to tame the art of manipulating puppets, a trip to the Far East to uncover the secrets of butto, Roueida Ghali, professor of bodily expression at UL, tries to give life and substance to her vision of the world and of the ‘art. Listening to him express himself on his multiple experiences and scenic experiments, one cannot help but think of this sentence from André Levingstone: “No activity expresses in a more immediate way, nor more palpable the manner of to be of an era, the state of a civilization or the originality of a race. Tell me how you dance and I’ll tell you who you are! But no expression of art escapes investigation more easily, nor defies analysis more obstinately than the movement of dance, fugitive among all, writing which, as soon as traced, is erased ”. From her beginnings as a dancer in the Ashtar troupe, that is to say since the early years of school, Roueida Ghali sensed a destiny placed under the sign of the limelight. Having chosen Fernando Arrabal’s The Ghost Train for the end of her university studies, she was seized by the violence and the “disgusting aspect” of the panic theater of the author of Viva la muerte and decided to present her work (distinctive mark of its originality) in a version where ugliness and violence are reduced. This woman who admires Pina Bausch and likes to read Kundera (but most often forgets the title and the author of the works she devours) speaks more readily of the teachers who helped her to perfect her dance training, such as Isabelle Dehaly, Carlotta Ikeda, Tutsuro Fukahara and Pierre Doucet. Define the dance? “It’s a vibration, an impulse,” she says. And the theater? “It’s a life .. . maybe a little more, a performance, ”she concludes. Refusing culture in the conventional sense of the term, ignoring the commercial circuit, Roueida Ghali is perfectly at ease in what she designates as “experimental” creation. For her, her art is a mixture of oriental dance, yoga, classical and contemporary ballet, butto and dramatic expression with a preeminence in gestures and movements. With a daring and new conception, the one who signed the Hindiyé choreography by Jalal Khoury offers the public an unprecedented philosophy of her art. To the classical ballet which, over the years gone by, has never undertaken anything but to seduce, to astonish, even to amaze, the dance of the XXth century opposes other preoccupations here. It is now important to address the mind as well as the eye and emotion. Roueida Ghali’s point is therefore different, as are the technique, the relationship to music or the conception of space. Edgar DAVIDIAN

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ARTIST PORTRAIT: Roueida Ghali – Dance is a vibration, an impulse …

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