Pharts, The Swiss Magazine of the Arts

Malaïka has always had a passion for dancing, which has haunted her since the age of 16. She has researched extensively into the many expressions of dance as well as into the interactions with dance in a number of very different cultures. To Malaïka, dance is not only a question of the stage and putting on shows but a way of expressing life. Malaïka travelled to many parts of the globe to discover and explore the arts of movement, walking and dance, and to find out what dancing is all about. Amongst others, she went to Africa (the birth place of her father), to India (in particular to be with the masters of the Baratha Natyam school), to Australia to observe the Aborigines and to Japan. In addition, she is fascinated by Sufi dancing and by the Italian tarantella.

One day, when she was 18, for no physical reason Malaïka became paralysed, unable to speak or move. She was going through the antagonism of cultures between her father, a Sudanese Muslim, and her Je- wish mother... While her parents inevitably separated, Malaïka was left to resolve the conflict within her. After two months she gained insight and was back on her feet. The crisis she went through convinced her to set off on a quest to find out why spirit needs a body to live in. And as dance played a part in her own renaissance, she worked with France Schott-Billmann who had developed a therapy based on movement and dance. However, no-matter how refined and beautiful it is, classical western dancing is essentially about being on stage – a tool to be used by choreographers that mainly seek to express aesthetics, social and political ideas or simply confront a sedentary audience with a mirror of beauty. This is not what Malaïka was looking for, who is more at home in a lively African crowd where bodies are gesticulating. Perhaps it was in Japan where she understood in essence that people move and dance in the same way that they breath. Dancing, therefore, is a way of expressing life through one’s breathing, opening up and depth.

This is what The being in body, Traces of a dancing body – the wonderful book that Malaïka recently published along with Roger Plaschy explores. Here, with prodigious virtuosity and sensitivity, Plaschy, the Swiss Valais

born photographer has captured and immortalised with disturbing images the interrelation ship between time, light and shadow. The photos are almost abstract forms of art that portray a wide horizon of interaction between the body, space and time, expressing simple, trenchant themes, such as death. It is not Malaïka’s body that we see but rather its expressions developed in service to movement and direction. The images are brought together in a fine layout designed by two friends of Malaïka – also from the Valais, and incidentally both dancers – and are interspersed with reflections and aphorisms taken from Malaïka extensive reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and of other works by Nietzsche – the only major European philosopher to have expressed the need and the depth of dance.

To capture this particular spirit, Malaïka produced a show called Traces, which goes all the way back to our remote ancestor, the ape, and the origins of dance, in which she enacts tales and stories composed by her self as well as by some of her students. As an example, one of the tales, Alphonsine, inspired by Maurice Zermatten, is a traditional Valais story of a girl whose body has been taken over by the devil. In another, Zarathoustra’s walk down into the village where he meets a rope dancer inspired Malaïka to produce a choreo- graphy that mirrors the fall – the dereliction – of man on Earth.