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<\/a><\/p>\nCompagnie Herv\u00e9 Koubi \u2013 \u201cSOL INVICTUS\u201d \u2013 Photo by Steven Pisano.<\/p>\n
Haskins: I have seen several different English translations for Sol Invictus.\u00a0 How do you translate Sol Invictus?<\/p>\n
Gabriel: It could be translated as \u201cinvincible sun.\u201d We kept it in the original Latin. Sol Invictus was an old pagan celebration, the ancestor of Christmas. During the Roman period it was a celebration that took place in the middle of the winter to hope for brighter days in the darkest days of the year, to hope for life and light to come back again. The name says that even if it\u2019s dark, and even if, in these moments, the situation, even the political situation, even the relationship between the people, is tense and a bit dark, we hope for better days in our everyday lives.<\/p>\n
Haskins: The moment shown in videos and that people talk about has a dancer spinning on his head, then a large swath of gold fabric is released and he gets swirled up in it. Was that dramatic effect intentional?<\/p>\n
Gabriel: It was. This golden fabric is a dramaturgic element that allows us to shape time and space throughout the work. It is something which is visual, but also something that is useful to express rebirth, part of the celebration hoping that the sun comes back. We focused on the circle of life, of the seasons, of ritual, and something that appears and disappears, dies and is reborn. That golden fabric comes on at different moments in the piece, and you can imagine several things. It is something that expresses different moments and helped us to develop the dramaturgic elements.<\/p>\n
Compagnie Herv\u00e9 Koubi \u2013 \u201cSOL INVICTUS \u2013 Photo by Daniel Roblin.<\/p>\n Haskins: Herv\u00e9\u2019s choreography and the company today suggests significant change. How did his choreography and the company shift from a classic ballet background to this contemporary street dance infused genre we\u2019ve come to know?<\/p>\n Gabriel: Well, it came out of this meeting with Algerian dancers. Herv\u00e9 was trained as a ballet dancer, but it was training in the Rosella Hightower dance school in Cannes. She was American, and her\u00a0 way of thinking is deeply American, different from France. In France, we like to put people in boxes\u2013you are a ballet dancer or you are a conceptual dancer, or whatever. And with Rosella Hightower, Herv\u00e9 took the advantage of an approach to dance, where it can be anything, as long as it\u2019s made with heart and purpose and skills. His background prepared him inside to welcome that porosity between different kinds of dances when we went to Algeria.<\/p>\n Haskins: It sounds like you have known Herv\u00e9 for a long time. How did you meet?<\/p>\n Gabriel:\u00a0 I created the company with Herv\u00e9. We met 30 years ago and created the company 27 years ago.<\/p>\n Guillaume Gabriel of Compagnie Herv\u00e9 Koubi \u2013 Photo courtesy of the artist.<\/p>\n Haskins: Did you meet dancing?<\/p>\n Gabriel: No. We were friends. I was not dancing. I was working in a bank and Herv\u00e9 was doing his studies as a student of pharmacy. And I remember one day I made a movement, and he said, \u201cOh, you should try to make that move.\u201d I made the move again, and he said, \u201cYou should take a ballet class.\u201d So I took one ballet class. I was 23 and my first ballet class was with little girls of seven years old. And then I took another one and another one, and then I decided to take one year without going to the bank. I applied for a sabbatical holiday and never went back to the bank. Then, we created the company and everything started at that moment. At first, I did not tell my parents. Only later did I let them know that I was not working in the bank anymore and that we created a dance company. They said, \u201cOkay, if you do what you like, it\u2019s good.\u201d<\/p>\n Haskins: What happened in Algeria?<\/p>\n Gabriel: After Herv\u00e9 learned that he had Algerian roots, we decided to go to Algeria, and we wanted to meet dancers from there, maybe for a project. The French Institute is the cultural center in Algeria and I asked for their support to help me to find dancers in Algeria. They said, \u201cThere are no dancers in Algeria. You can go and good luck, but there are no dancers.\u201d I managed to have five email addresses in Algeria. I wrote to these guys that we would like to meet dancers. We didn\u2019t care what techniques or where they were coming from. We just wanted to meet dancers.<\/p>\n The day of the casting, there were 250 people in the street. They were dancers, but they were not coming from ballet or contemporary dance. They were coming from the streets\u2013urban dance, acrobats, circus. What was great is with those dancers, we did a path toward them, and they did a path toward us, and we met in an in-between space never explored before in dance. We met those dancers and the strength of that porosity, of that ability to work with different techniques was the beginning of Herv\u00e9\u2019s reflection about what could be a contemporary ballet, a ballet of the 21st century that would leave space to those popular dances of today. If you look at the ballet of the 18th century, for example, you had steps coming from popular dances. The mazurka and the waltz were rooted in 18th century popular dances. For us, a ballet of the 21st Century would also leave space for dances of today, such as hip hop or Capoeira or break dance or different street dance.<\/p>\n Haskins: Once you met these Algerian dancers halfway, did that half way space involve some additional training for them beyond street dance.<\/p>\n Gabriel:\u00a0 They were only dancing. They had no other background. For most of them the experience with us was the first time they put feet on stage. It was totally something new. But they were ready in their brain, they were open to discover new things. And I think this is what you really need when you are a dancer, never to say, Okay, I know what I do, and I will do only that. This is my technique. No, you have to stay always aware, open to new things. And thanks to that, we managed to start a new way of doing things, of choreographing.]<\/p>\n Compagnie Herv\u00e9 Koubi \u201cSOL INVICTUS\u201d \u2013 Photo by M\u00e9lanie Lh\u00f4te.<\/p>\n Haskins: The company evolved from its beginning. How and why did it change?<\/p>\n Gabriel:\u00a0 There was a turn in the company in 2010 when we met those dancers in Algeria, but the company already had 10 years of existence in France and there were male and female dancers. In the very beginning, for the first creation there were 13 dancers on stage, eleven girls, and two boys, Herv\u00e9 and me. During those first ten years, we always worked with a lot of people on stage, men and women. As we developed the project in France and a bit abroad, I think everything was prepared to let the project develop itself with Algerian dancers, with that unique thing in the kind of hybrid place between ballet and hip hop and Capoeira and acrobatics. Over the first ten years, the company laid the groundwork, and then, with a seismic personal event and going to Algeria, discovering the wealth of street and other urban dancers, it just made sense to pivot the company focus to what has drawn international attention and praise.<\/p>\n Compagnie Herv\u00e9 Koubi \u2013 \u201cSOL INVICTUS\u201d \u2013 Photo by Steven Pisano.<\/p>\n Haskins: Can you talk about the seismic personal event?<\/p>\n Gabriel: Herv\u00e9 thought that he was French, but no, he was Algerian. I think every family, everyone has these little secrets. Herv\u00e9 put them on the stage, but I think this is something that could be shared with a lot of people in the audience.<\/p>\n Haskins: Many Americans might not know much about the relationship of Algeria and France. What was so shocking to someone who thought he was French to find out he was Algerian?<\/p>\n Gabriel: Herv\u00e9 was born and raised in France. Growing up, he knew there was a long and troubled history between France and Algeria, and that his parents had been born in Algeria, but understood that his grandparents were from France, had gone to Algeria as part of France\u2019s colonization of Algeria, and that his parents came back to France in the 1960s because of the decolonization war and the aftermath. He thought Herv\u00e9 was a tribute to his great grandparents from Brittany. He was raised in a way that was very French, not at all North African, and with light skin and freckles, he did not look at all North African.\u00a0 However, Koubi did not sound like a French last name. Herv\u00e9 was 25 when he asked his father about the last name. His father showed him a photo of an old man in traditional Arabic dress and said \u201cThis is your grandfather. He was not French. He did not speak French. Arabic was spoken from your mother\u2019s side and your father\u2019s side.\u201d\u00a0 It was a shock. Herv\u00e9 had no idea.<\/p>\n Haskins: Why did they hide it from Herv\u00e9?<\/p>\n Gabriel: When they came to France after the Algerian independence war, his parents thought that with the decision to come to France rather than be in Algeria, they would be welcomed with open arms. But that was not how it was. His mother told a story describing one example of how she encountered the widespread prejudice and subhuman regard by the French hold toward Algerians. When they came back to France, she went to the butcher and asked for some marguez, a North African sausage. The butcher replied, \u201cBut Madam, you are not in a savage place, you are in France.\u201d She realized that if she wanted to integrate, not be stigmatized and discriminated against, she had to be more French than the French. They raised Herv\u00e9 as if he were French, and his true history was put under the cover, in the closet.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n