Home Lands

Powerhouse: International, the newly launched arts festival in Gowanus, Brooklyn, continued its fall offerings with the multidisciplinary work “Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna,” co-presented with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival. The work, conceived by Brussels-based French-Malagasy choreographer and dancer Soa Ratsifandrihana, draws on her Madagascan origin and diasporic experience to tell unspoken stories held in gestures, rhythms, bodies, and memory. With original music performed live by guitarist Joël Rabesolo, Ratsifandrihana and performers Audrey Merilus and Stanley Ollivier piece together their entangled histories—rooted in Madagascar, Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, and shaped by life in France and Belgium, where they currently live.

Performance

“Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna” by Soa Ratsifandrihana

Place

Powerhouse: International, L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival,

Words

Karen Greenspan

Soa Ratsifandrihana, Audrey Merilus, and Stanley Ollivier in “Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna.” Photograph by Harilay Rabenjamina

Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna means “comparison, transmission, rivalry” in Malagasy. The program notes, describe it as “a diasporic mythology she [Ratsifandrihana] wished she’d heard.” One could call the work an excavated narrative of the children of diasporas.

The work got off to captivating start as the four performers, each dressed in improvised courtly and festival attire (costumes by Harilay Rabenjamina), put on long, white, satin gloves to take part in a “formal” dance. Joël Rabesolo stepped off to the left with his electric guitar to accompany the barefoot dancing couple performing a quasi-Renaissance dance. In this cheeky interpretation of a courtly dance, the couple proceeded directly forward toward the audience, formally holding inside hands, performing the sequence of steps. Afterwards, they parted, returned upstage, and began the downstage-moving sequence again. With each repetition, the dance and the music veered into modifications—at first, ever so slightly. Then as the music swerved into a minor key, the dance diverged further from the original with bodies breaking from upright into sweeping curves, restrained steps giving way to high kicks, and unshod feet defiantly flexed. By the end of the scene, the third dancer had joined, the dancers had donned circular capes (originally spread on the floor like picnic blankets), and they were spinning like whirling dervishes to a heavy metal guitar solo. This incisive commentary on forced cultural assimilation in foreign lands was nothing short of brilliant.

Soa Ratsifandrihana, Audrey Merilus, and Stanley Ollivier in “Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna.” Photograph by Harilay Rabenjamina

The tightly constructed beginning lost its momentum as the performers stumbled onto the floor in an endless scene of munching. Their invisible edibles, once ingested, suffused the dancers’ bodies with twitches, jerks, and movement isolations. Ratsifandrihana stepped over to the microphone and sang a song about a colonic called “Ignoral.” The song’s translation appeared in the projected supertitles. Upon looking up the word’s definition, “the act of intentionally disregarding or paying no attention to something,” one might guess that the dancers were purging their colonized bodies of an ill-fitting Western culture and the forced forgetting of their own.

The pace picked up when the dancers pulled on knee-high, silver, Gogo boots and began a series of marching patterns about the stage, rimmed by a bar of neon light (lighting design by Marie-Christine Soma). The unison movement evolved into steppy footwork peppered with rhythmic taps, jumps, kicks, and twists to the infectious funk beat coming from Rabesolo’s guitar. Although the choreography developed further into interesting variations, the music-video style routine remained in its groove for too long.

Soa Ratsifandrihana, Audrey Merilus, and Stanley Ollivier in “Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna.” Photograph by Harilay Rabenjamina

In a spoken scene, reminiscent of a Pina Bausch moment, the performers were required to recite difficult tongue twisters in various languages—as if in elementary school. Listening to each one of the foreign performers with their unique accents struggle to repeat the inane line, “Give Papa a paper cup of proper coffee in a copper coffee cup,” underscored how the task of mastering the languages of their colonizers was a demoralizing process that made people feel less than equal. Language as a source of diasporic trauma resurfaced in another overextended scene. A dancer, facing upstage in the shadows, repeated a simple step-touch pattern. Another dancer joined the repetitive phrase while speaking so softly that her words were unintelligible. The dancers eventually faced the audience—a third dancer feeding into the group allowed one of the others to drop out while the stepping rhythm endured. The switching in and out of dancers continued until all three were performing the pattern together. The speaker audibly revealed, “I speak this language to myself, so I don’t forget.”

“Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna” had much to say, but the work, clocking in at 85 minutes without an intermission, did not command the sustained attention necessary to convey its full message.

Karen Greenspan

Karen Greenspan is a New York City-based dance journalist and frequent contributor to Natural History Magazine, Dance Tabs, Ballet Review, and Tricycle among other publications. She is also the author of Footfalls from the Land of Happiness: A Journey into the Dances of Bhutan, published in 2019.

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