Oum Kulthum’s voice has travelled far beyond the language of her songs. More than five decades after the legendary Egyptian singer’s passing, her music continues to find new interpretations in Egyptian and Oriental dance, carrying with it a vocabulary of love, longing, devotion and heartbreak. It is this emotional world that choreographer and artistic director Debapriya Das and her Oriental dance company Nrityakosh explore in To Burn to Bloom, a 60-minute dance theatre production featuring eight dancers and an actor. Bringing together theatre, spoken text, voice work and visual storytelling — the production looks to mid-20th-century Cairo for its visual language, while moving through the feelings at the heart of Kulthum’s repertoire rather than recounting her life.
What made you choose her emotional and musical landscapes as the central point of the production, rather than narrating the story of the woman herself?
I deliberately did not want To Burn to Bloom to be a biography of Oum Kulthum. Her life and career have already been documented extensively through films, documentaries, books and articles. I was much more interested in the relationship people have with her music and what happens when that music becomes personal. As a dancer, my own relationship with Oum Kulthum began through her music. The more I studied Egyptian dance and classical Egyptian music, the more I understood the extraordinary emotional world within her compositions. Love, longing, heartbreak, desire, devotion and surrender — are all present, but they are rarely simple or expressed in isolation. Her music gives you an enormous emotional landscape to explore. There is also something very personal about the way dancers relate to Oum Kulthum. I have watched countless dancers interpret the same compositions and no two interpretations are ever quite the same. That idea became central to the production.
Her music is deeply rooted in Arabic poetry, maqam-based melodic structures and an elaborate tradition of vocal improvisation. When choreographing to her work, how do you respond to these musical structures physically?
One of the core features of Arabic music is the maqamat system and as dancers, we rely very heavily on the structures of Arabic music and its nuances. So, I do think it is extremely important for a dancer to understand the music, its classification within Arabic music and its structures. As you develop an understanding of the music, its rhythmic structures, melodic patterns, phrasing and improvisations — these elements gradually become more accessible. You begin to hear what the music is doing and that naturally starts influencing how you move and choreograph. And then there is tarab, which is a very unique aspect of Arabic music and doesn’t really have a direct English translation. For me, tarab is something you can understand and experience, but I’m not sure it can really be taught.
What specific elements of Egyptian dance inform the choreography in To Burn to Bloom?
For To Burn to Bloom specifically, the movement language is rooted in classical oriental and modern oriental dance. But Egyptian dance is vast and it actually draws from a very strong foundation of folk, cultural and social dance traditions. You can hear these influences in the music as well. When you take a form that has grown out of social and cultural practices and place it on a theatre stage, stagecraft becomes an important part of the process. The scale of movement, formations, use of space, transitions, theatrical presence and relationship with the audience all have to be considered differently. This is where I think theatre and other forms of stagecraft become useful.
How have you distributed narrative and emotional agency between the moving body and the spoken voice?
The entire production is built around storytelling and I have simply chosen to use different movement languages and theatrical skills to build that story. Dance remains the primary language of the production. The theatre, spoken voice and visual elements come in at particular moments because they allow us to take the story somewhere else. The actor, in particular, is not functioning as a conventional narrator or playing Oum Kulthum. I see the actor more as a listener, someone who is discovering her alongside the audience and helping us know Oum Kulthum a little more personally. There are things about her that are difficult to communicate simply through the music or through movement, particularly when we want to step away from the larger-than-life icon and get a little closer to the woman behind her public image. To Burn to Bloom chooses six of Oum Kulthum’s iconic songs. These compositions are rooted in love, devotion and heartbreak — but the poetry and emotional worlds within them are much deeper and more complex.
What aspects of Cairo during this period have informed the visual dramaturgy — beyond simply reproducing a recognisable ‘Egyptian’ aesthetic?
The music we have chosen spans from the 1930s to about the 1970s, so it was important for us to understand the Cairo in which this music was being created and, more importantly, the Cairo that worshipped Oum Kulthum. The costumes, archival-inspired visuals and the overall visual language are all ways of giving the audience a glimpse into that world and into the cultural atmosphere that surrounded her music.
September 20. At Alliance Française, Thimmaiah Road.
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