Madonna, Jay Z and Beyonce collaborator descends on Perth Festival
Why famed choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is making a Gandhi-inspired dance work staged in a Perth shopping mall.
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was emotionally spent. A succession of taxing productions had tangoed too closely with the most inhospitable terrain of the human soul and pushed the internationally lauded choreographer into “escaping” planet earth: if only allegorically.
Among them was Shell Shock: A Requiem of War – a funeral dance oratorio debuted at La Monnaie/De Munt in Brussels in 2014. Commemorating a century since the end of the Great War, composer Nicholas Lens would turn to Australia’s chief excavator of the soul, Nick Cave, to supply the libretto made up of 12 Canti. The songsmith tackled the assignment with haunting precision, writing: “I am the angel of death/I catch breath.”
In its wake Cherkaoui found himself longing for a spiritual and aesthetic antidote far beyond the terrestrial pathos of such works, what he would eventually find in 2015 in the successful stage adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s manga cult classic Pluto: a proto-techno paean to the cosmic fable, Astro Boy. In 2016 he would go on to collaborate with sculptor Antony Gormley in the otherworldly production Icon for the Goteborg Opera Dance Company, replete with surrealistic clay masks divined from the realm of fantasy.
“I just really wanted to leave the planet,” Cherkaoui says of the period. “I felt like I was in a cage. Art is about freedom, and I didn’t feel free any more. So, I started to create works that were science fiction, pure imagination. I wanted to escape humanity – it was all too much. But [the pandemic in 2020] pulled me back to earth – I returned! It helped me restructure my life and work and remind me that dance had a purpose – that it can be useful. It took me back to what dance meant in my youth.”
Cherkaoui’s childhood is one he unflinchingly describes as “meaningless” before he found dance – or, he posits, dance found him. Born in Antwerp in 1976 to a Moroccan father and Flemish mother, his worldview would prove an eternal tug-of-war between Christianity and Islam: a child of two realms, neither of whose strictures seemed to make much sense to a boy who dreamed of becoming a visual artist.
The international explosion of hip hop in the early 1980s would prove salvation as much as a sanctuary for a young man by now also coming to terms with his queer sexuality: with dance proffering a distinctive roadmap by which to live as an individual within a collective society.
“Dance is about perspective and proximity,” he suggests, drawing distinct parallels with everyday life.
“It’s about individuals coexisting in a space. Dance is really an incredible language that demonstrates how to [harness] and navigate friction.”
Cherkaoui’s rise as a dancer would be as rapid as it was divergent: trading the ghetto blasters for orchestras – the roughhewn asphalt for the gilded stage – as he trained and distinguished himself in the traditions of ballet and contemporary jazz. But as he ventured ever deeper into the hallowed temples of culture and the canonical repertoire, Cherkaoui never allowed himself to forsake his roots – what began with fashioning routines as a child in his loungeroom set to the latest hits from Michael Jackson and Madonna. He would eventually go on to work intimately with the latter, as the choreographer on her 2023-24 sellout Celebration Tour.
Cherkaoui’s daring crossover into the pop world led to no shortage of high-profile invitations to collaborate, including with Beyonce and Jay Z. He would go on to choreograph Jagged Little Pill the Musical: the stage show inspired by Alanis Morissette’s landmark 1995 album that would go on to tour internationally, including Australia in 2021-22.
While a regular visitor to Australia, Cherkaoui only now makes his debut choreographing a domestic work in the country, exclusive to 2025’s Perth Festival – a longstanding invitation stalled by the pandemic. Working with Perth-based progressive ensemble STRUT, Manifest is a three-night performance directly inspired by the non-violent resistance of Mahatma Gandhi. A disruptive yet peaceful public intervention in what Cherkaoui describes as a time of global physical and spiritual malaise.
Set to an original score featuring Noongar performer Ian Wilkes accompanied by two pianos, Manifest unites local dancers with a “silent choir” of 50 volunteers – all whom Cherkaoui has collectively been directing via teleconference from Amsterdam, where he has just debuted a contemporary production of Mozart’s Idomeneo for the Dutch National Opera and Ballet: a similarly prescient work about global forces, abuse of power and generational succession.
STRUT Dance co-director James O’Hara enjoys a symbiotic relationship with Cherkaoui’s artistry, having formed a collaborative partnership and personal friendship with the choreographer as a young performer in Europe two decades ago.
Following subsequent tenures in the UK and New Zealand, O’Hara would eventually return to his hometown of Perth to join Sofie Burgoyne in heading up the two-decades-old dance company in 2022, overseeing an increasingly daring and challenging program that attempts to recalibrate how audiences engage with the city, known by its custodians as Boorloo. Unconventional stages have included hotel rooms and the capricious Indian Ocean.
“Forrest Place came up as a potential meeting ground for these universally shared human experiences, in a distinctly local context,” O’Hara explains of the unusual decision to stage Manifest publicly in Perth’s central shopping mall – part of the broader Perth Moves program, that has run over several years and includes public workshops and a dedicated “queer elder dance club”.
“A space of gathering for thousands of years, and more recently a place of colonisation, commerce and passage, Forrest Place is also where protesters in this city often gather in solidarity and peaceful resistance against the injustices of local and global issues. Manifest … celebrates the arts as a powerful catalyst for conversation, perspective and contemplation.”
As one of dance’s most consequential iconoclasts in high demand the world over, Cherkaoui – who will be in Perth for the performances – is increasingly committed to sharing both the transcendental and primordial power of movement with the masses.
“I think dance is just like sleeping and eating, it is something that we simply need to do,” Cherkaoui concludes, before pausing to consider his words. “It’s not for nothing that there are countries where it remains illegal to dance. I think that says enough. If it was harmless it wouldn’t be banned. I really, really believe it is a human need.”
Manifest takes place in Forrest Place as part of Perth Festival from February 18-20. The Perth Moves program runs at various locations around the city from today until February 20.
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