Slapstick and sexual politics at Suresnes Cités Danse — review

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Pantomime isn’t exactly the first thing you’d expect at a hip-hop festival. Yet from over-the-top lip syncs to glitching office encounters, there was plenty of slapstick comedy to be found over the opening weekend of Suresnes Cités Danse, France’s most venerable hip-hop festival.

Much of it could have used additional refining. Carolyn Occelli, who succeeded the event’s founding director Olivier Meyer in 2022, opted to open this year’s edition with Leïla Ka, a bright new talent on the French scene. She has made her name in recent seasons with a series of vivid vignettes centred on women. In 2022’s Bouffées, the only sound was their breath, setting the pace of their staccato gestures — a raised fist to the cheek, a hand to the forehead, in complex canons that kept separating them and then bringing them together.

Bouffées now forms the first — and strongest — part of Ka’s first evening-length creation, Maldonne, which opened Suresnes Cités Danse’s main-stage line-up. Transitioning from fierce, compact bursts of movement to the light and shade required over 60 minutes is a challenge for any choreographer, and Maldonne often feels like a series of separate scenes cobbled together.

The lack of a musical arc doesn’t help: the uncredited score veers from shapeless techno to classical music and popular songs. To a 1990s tear-jerker from singer Lara Fabian, the five performers lip sync like Drag Race veterans; shortly afterwards, they return to more reserved swaying, predictably structured to Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love”.

The potential is there: in a burlesque scene reminiscent of Jiří Kylián’s Sechs Tänze, Ka ably amps up the theatricality, with women coming in and out to scold and help each other. All Maldonne needs is the craft to take them on a larger journey.

On Suresnes’ smaller stage, on the other hand, two multitalented young performers sustained distinctive characters. In En pièce jointe, Armande Sanseverino and Gaël Germain spoof an old-fashioned office dynamic: the boorish boss who sexually harasses a timorous secretary.

Workplace offences would likely be a lot more subtle today, but they take it to impressive physical extremes. Technicians initially wheel them on to the stage on carts, like life-size dolls, and both move in choppy phrases, rewinding and fast-forwarding through mimed sequences. Both speak, too, adding to the absurdity with self-aware asides to the audience. The wide-eyed Sanseverino ultimately rebels and turns the situation on its head — an unsurprising ending point, but a neat start for this duo to watch.

★★★☆☆

Festival runs to February 8, theatre-suresnes.fr/suresnes-cites-danse