Flavia Dalila D’Amico: In music In Levare is placing the accent on a weak note, that relieves us for a moment from a continuous beat. In Levare, however, is also to rebel, to rise up together. For your vocation and artistic research, do you find yourself more in the first or in the second definition? What does ‘In Levare’ refer you to?
Charlie Khalil Prince: In my practice, I believe in, and defend the right to highlight our “weaknesses”, or in other words putting forward our vulnerability as inseparable from the act of rising up and rebelling. In a world that demands of us to harden in order to move through and survive, I feel it is a powerful act of resistance to yield into what makes us vulnerable, and move from this exposed place. The practice of dance is a great vehicle to highlight the vulnerability of humanity, this humanity being summoned within the body on stage being, moving, experiencing and sensing. Beyond dance, it is the power of performance, of agreeing to gather at a specific place and time in order to witness an act of revelation. To perform is to reveal over time, and what we choose to reveal and how is anchored in the craft of choreography: ‘the body symphonic’ was constructed as a ‘concert-performance’: placing equal emphasis on the gesture of playing music as in the gesture of dancing – which arguably are an extension of one another . I am joined on stage by the brilliant percussionist Joss Turnbull who specializes in Iranian drum Tombak and Zoorkhaneh.
There is a deep pulse that undulates through this work, whether it is through the silence between percussive tones, the haunting sound of a drone created when a cello bow meets the strings of the guitar, or the distant sound of war shooting out of a spinning microphone. Sound and body are deconstructed, as well as the archives that emerge from the conversation between the two: In Levare in this case then, becomes about lifting off, about allowing the body to ascend into new, mythological territories of itself, maybe previously unimagined, but certainly emerging and in a state of constant becoming.
Flavia Dalila D’Amico: How does The body symphonic incorporate the multiple crises that hit Lebanon between 2019 and 2021, and how does this performance resonate with the current crisis?
Charlie Khalil Prince: In a kind of meditation, almost a prayer, on what Lebanon has been through in recent years, the body symphonic allows me to express the recognition of a certain mourning, but also the celebration of this incredible force of life that resists oppression and occupation. I sometimes get the impression that we move from one crisis to another, and navigating this motion becomes the choreography of how we exist and persist.
The body is a site of being.
It is matter that is shaped, deformed, that ascends and emerges.
It is a site of revolution, of oppression.
Of representation and mis-representation. Of wholeness and fragmentation.
It is the surface where ideas and action meet.
It is the container of manifestos, of traumas, of unanswered questions and fragile answers.
That being said, the state of my presence in ‘the body symphonic’ can be likened to a mirror, and in this mirror emerges the current realities that are affecting me and my people. We are living in a dangerous moment, where we are witnessing on our phones, in live stream the ethnic cleansing of an entire population in Gaza and the West Bank , where the genocidal Zionist entity massacres whole villages in Lebanon , burns our forests in the South and destroys our beloved cities with total impunity. All this under the careful guise and support of fascistic Western governments. The rage and the grief that I feel in the face of this reality inevitably makes it into my performance , as long as the body is an archive of history, and this history is inscribed in my flesh. Dance is necessary, whether to celebrate, to mourn, to forget, or to remember; it is an essential force to reclaim the body, to remind us that we are alive, and that despite everything, we exist.