The Brooklyn Rail

Once the dust settles, flowers bloom, choreographed and directed by Olivier Tarpaga, opens with a shower of plastic flip flops. Seven dancers and five musicians carry the residue of empty footprints and absent bodies through the next seventy minutes of nonstop performance, layering movements, melodies, and percussive rhythms into a series of dynamic compositions about displacement. Dust responds to individual accounts of women and children living in a new refugee camp located in the northern city of Kaya, Tarpaga’s birthplace. This region in the north of Burkina Faso is currently occupied by jihadists.

According to the choreographer’s statement of intent, several of the tragic personal experiences of the women from this region serve as source material for Dust. Since 2015, more than two million people have been forced from their homes within Burkina Faso, making it one of the worst internal displacement crises in Africa.¹ Dust researches the struggle against religious extremism, physical violence, death, and displacement occurring today with devastating impact in northern Burkina Faso. Tokens from Burkinabe women’s stories take symbolic form in a uterus on a black flag, abandoned flip flops arranged into the square of a child’s grave, and a piece of cloth pulled like a sack over a performer’s head.

How can a dance wrap its arms around a geopolitical crisis in which over five thousand people have died just this year? Dust unfolds in a style close to Tanztheater,² but with live music and vocals instead of words and narrative, creating clear segmentation, emotional specificity, and striking frameworks for each danced vignette. The choreography seems to fuse West African dance forms, Kathak, and other Eastern dance influences with contemporary movement styles, intermingling fast-paced, distinctive phrasing and fluidity. Individual dancers perform with clarity and exuberance; yet each performer’s quality remains distinct from the next. One dancer floats over the floor, gliding and swaying in half moon loops carved between her hips and ribs. Another dancer’s body vibrates and then explodes with staccato pulses that pepper through his torso and thighs. They perform alone and together, using asynchronous pacing, and intelligent, humanity-reinforcing threads—such as a bare bulb, a small shoe, mosquito netting, or a loud cry—to fuse separate strands of expression into a compelling collective response to “the most neglected displacement crisis in the world.” ³

The set production, designed by Michaela Solnická Volná, is minimalist and purposeful, functioning in the same way that found objects and materials might be repurposed in a refugee camp to make essential structures in an improvised living space. Long sheets of mosquito netting (something typically found in the houses near markets around Kaya, according to the choreographer) hang across the exposed brick back of the stage. Each screen creates a semi-opaque curtain over each musician—setting their physical presence apart from the dancers, while accessible through a utilitarian, gauze-like frame. Dancers manipulate the long row of pendant bulbs and the giant piles of plastic flip flops as both prop and scenery. These elements wedge elegant, porous divisions into the stage, with dancers and musicians nestling behind or slipping between the constructed pockets of space. The scenography spreads and bisects our attention preventing a simplistic scan of the stage as a single unitary expanse.

Tarpaga composes a thick musical landscape (in collaboration with his musicians) layering voice, electric and acoustic guitar and bass, vocals, drums, and string instruments: the kora and the djeli n’goni. While the live sound envelops everyone in the building, it also splits the stage apart. Musical performers are visible but muted—visually, acoustically, and kinetically. They remain primarily upstage, behind netting, seated. Tarpaga’s intelligence and masterful composition are palpable in the tension born between the layers and edges of each modality in his work. The thematic strands, energies, and edges relate and coincide, but do not completely cohere.

The choreographer’s desire to celebrate resistance and resilience comes through in his artistic choices. Perhaps the strongest of these is his decision to feature Wassa Kouyaté as the kora-player and lead vocalist for this performance. The kora is a twenty-one string West African instrument played by just the thumb and forefinger of each hand. The long-necked instrument, made from a calabash gourd, resembles a cross between a guitar, lute, and plucked harp. The kora originates from the Mande region of West Africa and while not definitive, its history dates to musical traditions of the great Empire of Mali in the thirteenth century. The materials used in its construction have a mythological symbolism.⁴ Playing was, by tradition, passed from father to son for generations among just a small number of families (griot). But this custom is evolving through the remarkable virtuosity of contemporary female West African musicians. Wassa Kouyaté is the only professional female griotte from Mali, and Tarpaga designates Kouyaté’s voice and stunning kora playing, to anchor the entire melodic arc and emotional resonance of the piece.

Dust is at its most compelling when it transforms trauma and geopolitics into the raw energy of sound and movement. Tarpaga fuses polyphonic melodies and rhythms into dances that pulse, shatter, and recombine in new arrangements. His choreographic and musical scores follow natural currents of phrasing that eddy, swell, and subside. The movement and musical compositions pile onto each other, join, and then unfasten with tails and fraying edges. The virtuosic dancing shifts from raw, impossibly fast and punctuated solo performances to euphonious duets, intimate trios, and tight pulsing packs of bodies—quartets, quintets, and full company unisons. However, even in the unison moments, where sound, voice, and bodies create one swarm, the group never fully subsumes the individual. To me, this was one of the most profound and successful aspects of the work. The individual performers’ voices, while compassionately echoing and responding to each other, never lose their own distinctive presence. The dance fights for the individual to survive—physicalizing the power and potential in just one life.

1. “Since 2015, more than 16,000 civilians, troops and police have died in jihadist attacks in Burkina Faso, according to a count by an NGO monitor called the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). More than 5,000 have died since the start of 2023.” “Burkina Faso,” AfricaNews, posted May 9, 2023, https://www.africanews.com/2023/09/05/53-members-of-burkina-security-forces-killed-in-suspected-jihadist-attack/#:~:text=Since%202015%2C%20more%20than%2016%2C000,the%20start%20of%20this%20year.
2. Tanztheater (dance theater) is an expressionistic style of dance that emerged from Weimar Germany and Vienna in the late 1920s. Pioneers of this form include Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss, and Rudolf Laban. Students of these artists include Pina Bausch (who studied under Jooss, and succeeded him as director of Wuppertal Tanztheater) and Susanne Linke (who studied under Wigman.)
3. “Ukraine gets the attention. This country's crisis is the world's ‘most neglected’,” NPR News, posted July 6, 2023, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/06/1183777863/how-burkina-faso-became-the-worlds-most-neglected-displacement-crisis#:~:text=That%20lagging%20international%20response%20is,have%20been%20displaced%20multiple%20times.
4. “The art of the kora,” Harald Loquenz, accessed Oct 28, 2023, https://www.kora-music.com/e/frame.htm.