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Sutra

Sutra is a kind of travel log, which led Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui to one of the sources of his inspiration, the Shaolin temple in China, the cradle of kung-fu, the mythic site where one comes across the ghost of Bruce Lee and one of the world’s most elaborated body of thought on the human body, the monks’ spirituality and the practice of martial arts.

Working at the Henan monastery, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui sought a dual initiation: he received gestures, rituals, rhythms and intuitions from the monks at the Shaolin temple, while offering them a contemporary choreographic framework, composed of the arrangement of bodies, other speeds, other types of musicality. This exchange, transferred to the stage of a show, resembles the learning of a new language, written between East and West, that respects the kung-fu tradition and contributes an original viewpoint to it, as though it concerned going back to the origins of an art that is also a life-style.

It is the body and its energy – mastered, released, vital, animal – that enlivens the stage of Sutra, where 17 Shaolin monks encircle Sidi Liarbi Cherkaoui in a choreography that shuns folkloric recreation to better reinvent a philosophy of life through its speeds and pauses, its bursts and its withdrawals, its apparent vivacity and its internal release, its animal inspiration and its spiritual surges.

The English artist Antony Gormley composed the visual and scenographic part of this universe while the Polish musician Szymon Brzóska worked on its most intimate revelation, between pulsing rhythm and melancholic discretion.

In this strange zone, where bodies use all the physical means at their disposal while preserving the soothing powers of mediation, a physical grammar composed of tradition and modernity, of matter and imagination has been written that tries to build a passage between a civilization and those who discover it: this journey of initiation that leads to the beauty of gesture.

CONCEPT & CHOREOGRAPHY SIDI LARBI CHERKAOUI SCENOGRAFIE ANTONY GORMLEY DANCE MONNIKEN VAN DE SHAOLIN TEMPEL MUZIKALE UITVOERING COORDT LINKE, OLGA WOJCIECHOWSKA, ALIES SLUITER, LAURA ANSTEE, SZYMON BRZÓSKA

PRODUCTION Sadler's Wells (UK)

CO-PRODUCTION Athens Festival (GR), Festival de Barcelona Grec (ES), Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg (LU), De Munt/La Monnaie Brussel, Festival d'Avignon (FR), Fondazione Musica Per Roma (IT), Shaolin Cultural Communications Company (CN) | ism met Toneelhuis