A Night at the Ballet: L’Algérie Ma Liberté

This is an older piece that I am still attached to but needs work!

​In the distant past - the year 2009 - the Ballet National Algerien (BNA), under their artistic director, Fatma Zohra Namous Senouci, premiered their ballet L’Algérie Ma Liberté(My Freedom, Algeria), which commemorated the fated struggle for independence that was (and still is) in many people’s minds as the foundational moment of the modern Algerian nation. In the midst of this struggle, and in the immediate aftermath, lay the most crucial of all inquiries: what does it mean to belong to a new, post-colonial nation? What does it mean to be Algerian? How can we achieve independence, not only colonially, but culturally? There are naturally many directions in which this line of inquiry can go and these are not the immediate concern of this essay. I am concerned here with the various ways in which cultural productions in dance speak of a certain idea about nationalism and the nation. To abstract a broader nation from this exercise would defeat the purpose. The goal of this paper then is to grant us a privileged insight into how Algerian nationalism operates or even assent to a universally stable concept of the nation. Rather, in living inside this ballet I will hope to give us insight into the nation as both performative and dynamic. Performative insofar as the national is not predetermined but is rather embodied and sought after.

​To move forward however, I would like to pose a series of shortcomings and problematics that this project will seek to address in full and in other avenues. Firstly, I am well aware that analyzing a singular piece of artistic work without being privy to perhaps more crucial notes and thoughts on its production might fall victim to the anti-gravitational object, devoid of analytic rigor, might see an object like a ballet as a universal cypher, or worse yet, a fetish entirely detached from its cultural context. I do not see this object as a miraculous or universal product that accurately describes how all Algerians feel about the nation at all points in history. No national project is universally adopted, comprehended, or actualized on its own terms. This ballet is, for better or worse, a ballet at the end of the day. It encapsulates a general emotion, a story that drives it, a nationess about the nation that is nonetheless culturally specific. And while I would not like to fetishize this piece, I would like to add that it is both fascinating and a miracle in a minor sense. Throughout the course of my investigation into Algerian ballet, I have only encountered short fragments or general news clippings on the premiere of such and such a ballet with no follow up of recourse. This piece on the other hand was uploaded in full to Youtube revealing to be what is a production-level recording full of close ups and fades. In that sense it is a miracle that can be played over and over and pondered about which might in itself be a sort of a copout on the whole miracle department. A second issue that I am working through, and which is certainly not unique is what we choose to call nationalism and in turn what it even is. How do you point to a map and call it a nation? To not address this would amount to being an intellectually lazy shortcut. Instead, what I would like for us to think about, more than a concrete concept of the nation, I propose that we see the nation as a concept that, alongside all other ideas, lives in constant epistemological tension both in the present and elsewhere. Put differently, the nation in my mind both lives in the realm of the shorthand in the same way that one might write a word in their palm to remember what you are supposed to pick up from the grocery store. Secondarily, the nation is a promise; it is the out there that one can hold on to in the midst of blatant oppression and subjugation. It is a name. I do not hold all of the answers to the epistemological problematic that the nation poses, I will attempt to present to us the tension that My Freedom, Algeria both plays with and lives in.

​The ballet opens with a retrospective and an invocation. Its time is both now and yesterday. It immediately asks that we accept the minimalism of the set as an obdurate set piece as well as one that survives throughout time. There is clear suffering in the dancer’s movements across stage as they both animate their set pieces and the stage around her. This in turn gives way to a scene depicting the disdain with which French pieds noirs (mis)treated working class Algerians in the streets prior to the revolution. Here we catch the first glimpse of the strategies through which this ballet presents us with its own conception of the nation. The artistic director and her team understand not only the visuals of colonial life but more effectively the emotional valence that these scenes engender. The dancer’s dolorous solo reverberates in this tableau which is naturally accompanied by dramatically bombastic music. In the background we are made privy to what will become the governing narrative strategy for the play: the schoolyard. This story has a dual origin. From the outset we have our soloist who sets the tone for the play only to give way to the schoolyard ballerina that looks back at the conflict and what the revolution came to be. The school in my reading of the ballet lives in at least three different realms. First, it proposes a didactic approach towards the Algerian Revolution. It suggests that, in the wake of the 50th anniversary of the struggle there are still opportunities for it to be used as an important historical signifying event. I write this not as a dismissal of the Algerian Revolution as anything other than an important development in the liberation fronts of North Africa and Africa in general, but I instead linger on this fact because of the symbolic efficiency that the event holds. It is both not so removed that it cannot still be felt and yet it is not an exactly immediate event. At the same time however, this event has come to define a great deal of scholarship about Algeria post-1962 such that there is almost no cogent way to speak about the incredible violence that took place throughout the nation in the 80s and 90s. I am not suggesting a false equivalence or attempting to make a whataboutist argument. Rather, what I would like to highlight here is the important role that the revolution plays in the Algerian imaginary of the ballet as something that can utilize shorthand to invoke a certain sort of feeling. The school further suggests an asymmetrical acculturation project. It is easy to be lulled by the ballet into a sense of radical distinctions however, I would like for us to keep in mind that, like in all things, struggles cannot always make distinctions between revolutionaries and reactionaries. There are indeed those who were forcefully acculturated by the colonial educational system in Algeria and simultaneously, there are those who, in hopes of rising among the ranks of the colonial hierarchies actively sought French education. This is not a new insight in any sense of the word. Instead, what I would like to suggest with this interpretation is that the schoolyard as such is not an evenly distributed space. It is made opaque by its universalities and by the ways in which it turns a blind eye to its contradictions. The uniformity of our characters, both in costume and in action, speaks to the systematic attempts to correct for a multifarious society composed of an incredible patchwork of individuals and cultures. This furthermore suggests a universality achievable through a costuming of the self both on the level of costume changes but more profoundly on the level of the self as both schoolchildren and revolutionaries by the costume that they wear. The self in this sense is public and interchangeable first and individual second. The schoolgirl ballerina weaves in and out of the individual as the plot requires it but can ultimately be seen as the everywoman of the revolution. Her role is paradoxically predetermined by an uncertain event that has nonetheless already taken place. We have been here before.

Lastly, I would like to suggest that the school exists as a space of cultural and social hybridity. The schoolyard sets up the possibility for a third and new way of living. It allows then for us to think about a nation that is not either this or that but rather takes on both in new ways and, in so doing, creates a new idea. Put differently, the school sets up the possibility for change to happen and to mobilize. Anachronistically, it speaks to the broader struggles that years like 1968 would embody and enact on school campuses. As such, I would say that, in an unprecedented fashion, the schoolyard opens the established social hierarchies to create not-exactly French subjects but rather a new category of individuals which newly found skills that in turn allowed for a new subject to emerge. This to me speaks clearly about the metanarrative of the ballet and indeed what is most interesting to my project. Allow me to speculate for a short second. Ballet, and to a lesser degree theatre, speaks to a provincial sensibility that can and indeed should represent important historical events in Algerian history. The BNA’s constitution (retrieved from the Way Back Machine, Archive.org) suggests as much by opening with its mission statement to encompass and record all Algerian dances for the purposes of preserving Algeria’s cultural heritage. There is a bourgeois interest in preserving Algerian culture in this haute couture sense such that all dances might inevitably be adapted and remixed into a ballet. The potential answer to my general inquiry, I sometimes feel, lives somewhere in between the hybrid and the bourgeois. On the one hand, there is an almost scientific project behind this ballet and on the other there is a genuine embrace of the form which cannot be denied. It would be improper to assume by arguing about provincialisms and bourgeois sensibilities that ballet as a form can only be practiced by the West in earnest. There is indubitably a genuine usage of ballet that is born precisely by living life as an Algerian ballerina such that it is only natural that Algerian stories are also told on stage. And so, by virtue of the fact that these ballets exist there must be something subtler and more complicated about ballet in Algeria. I wonder about this quite a bit to no avail.

Is this then an important case study to delve into given the theoretical shortcomings? I argue that studying Algerian ballet, and My Freedom might help us not only understand how nationalism is performed on and off stage but how we can think about commemoration and collective cultural memory. After all, the motivation for this piece (from what I can ascertain from the limited newspaper clippings) suggests that indeed this piece was put up for the explicit purpose of commemoration the Algerian liberation struggle and as such we are dealing not simply with a display of nationalism as an everyday-sort of performative nationalism but instead is of a rather different kind. While I cannot imagine the BNA as somehow separate from its socio-political milieu, at the same time, its artistic motivations cannot be so easily written off as strictly governmentally motivated. This public display of nationalism then does not conform to other writing on nationalist government-first displays and instead lives in a separate public/private space of what I call individual nationalistic fervor. This of course is not a new concept in itself but it does allow for us to ask questions outside of our concerns with propaganda and broader totalizing artistic projects furthered by any one state. I am however cautious of swinging too far to the other camp of this sort of approach due in part to the gradations that exist both in political and artistic commitments of all members of a ballet company in charge of celebrating the nation 50 years after its conception. What I propose for us to think about is a sort of lowkey nationalism that seeks not so much to live in the middle as much as it does in the interstices of both radical poles of political commitment such that it goes without mention and, more importantly without question. What does this offer to the current discourse on nationalism in North Africa and the Global South in general? While this is an early venture into how the nation echoes and reverberates against colonial models of nation-building and self-conception as a national, I would say that this insight recognizes the nation as precisely something that only appears to be fixed but that in reality requires active participation, interpellation, and repetition. It is not given beforehand as an ideal to return to (as one could erroneously assume about Islamist pushes in Algeria post-1962) and at the same time is not unmodified by colonial structural constructions the efforts of which feel significant and important. Watching through My Freedom, Algeria I cannot help but feel an almost obvious need for self-actualization through the medium of ballet of this most-historical of moments for the Algerian people. Furthermore, this piece poses a variety of problems that the piece itself cannot answer on its own, but which should nonetheless be elucidated and explored: how to we write about seemingly conformist art making? I understand that in posing this question as such I am revealing an avant gardist sensibility however I cannot help but see in this piece a certain degree of complicity with a view of the nation that papers over the different experiences that make up Algerian society and as such feel that this should be addressed in this essay. There is of course no perfect version of this piece that could address every single form of critique but instead what we do have is this commemorative piece. I would like to say that it feels odd to go back and rehearse the revolution despite the years of military and civilian violence the nation underwent in the decades leading to 2009 however this is not a unique occurrence. Drawing from other post-colonial nations we do indeed see the nationalist invocation as an effective unifying gesture despite the inherent contradictions that this sort of movements obscure. Only in the vacuum of academic musings do I arrive at this feeling of uneasiness with this piece. This is all to say that at stake here is finding strategies to work with and against how this ballet wants to be seen and understood in the greater scheme of Algerian artistic productionand can that ultimately be made legible as anything other than assenting with the ballet’s mission?

Understandably, I am struggling to find a useful methodological frame to discuss this ballet due in part to the variety of structures of meaning making that this piece comfortably lives in. On one side, we are dealing with a contemporary ballet piece that dances in bare feet and lose garments. On the other, we are not quite dealing with Western contemporary ballet sensibilities that address what the role of things like hijab are in both revolutionary and contemporary Algerian society in subtle and overt ways. This question in particular speaks back to the ballet’s commitment to period-appropriate clothes for the historical aspects of the piece which suggests not only a dual temporality that has so far been elucidated in my short analysis on the piece, but which creates an anachronistic aesthetic issue for the ballet. While we do see Algerian ballerinas donning at times school uniforms and later period-appropriate military fatigues, we see the French military forces in what can only be described as Matrix-era sleeveless dusters with tattooed arms and spiked hair. I am by no means an expert on French colonial military attire, but I am certain that this is not period-appropriate garments to wear. I jest. This approach towards the French and their position in the ballet reveals a dichotomy that is central to the piece: French bad, Algerian good. One might from the outside drawn a clear line between Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and My Freedom, Algeria in their portrayal of the French military which was indeed brutal but which this ballet in particular heavily sprinkles them with an irredeemably evil character. This coding of the French, while anything other than subtle nonetheless leaves room for audiences to discover and piece together inside references to the struggle. Of import, and something that I could not stop thinking about once I figured it out was the simile drawn between the acting official on the French side and French general Paul Aussaresses, made legible to the audience by his infamous eye patch. Paul Aussaresses served in Algeria before and during the Algerian struggle for independence and had famously admitted and supported the use of torture in the Algerian colony as a necessary tool. This insight into the creators of this ballet suggests to me the very subtle ways in which this ballet is crafted as something that can operate in the realm of the overt and the obvious but that can similarly play in the realm of subtlety that by the same token might be able to interrogate the revolution in more historically-accurate ways than perhaps other prior works on the revolution might (see The Battle of Algiers). It is small, and perhaps might not mean anything, but is still a fascinating Easter egg to find in this people. It is a necessarily culturally specific reference which is not surprising in this context, but it is not exactly in your face asking to be decoded. It lives in the background for the audience to figure out on their own. Lastly, I see this reference operated on the level of interpellation insofar as it seeks to hail those privy to this information and, in so doing, to self-identify with the struggle portrayed on stage. It is not simply that we are dealing with the brutality of French rule but that we are dealing with specific actors responsible for these atrocities and that, if there were any justice in the world, would have been made to stand trial for their war crimes. And while this is pure speculation, it must have been in the designers’ referential milieu (and perhaps still fresh in the broader cultural memory of the times) to invoke such a powerful aesthetic signifier in their piece which in turn suggests the clear palpability of the revolution as an effective symbol in the aesthetic discourse.

Again, what we see is an agreement between the revolution and its monolithic edifications reconfigured and represented as gestures which manifest in the form of the dancer overtaken by the suffering of the people, the torturing of the innocent by the hand of the duster-clad French officers and furthermore the figure of the militant Algerian woman committed to the cause. It is through this character that we see the revolution realized and completed. I have mentioned earlier how the schoolyard sets the scene for the ballet and acts as an organizing figure and I would here like to expand upon it. The dance is organized around the notion of the revolution as a memory. This re-membering in turn takes the form of the female revolutionary, Zohra, the everywoman of the vanguard whose starting point is the schoolyard. The schoolyard, which stands at the forefront of France’s colonial education is herein subverted as a fourth space for organizing and strategizing in public. This subtle departure from the historical record suggests a variety of things and I will focus only on a couple of them. Firstly, the replacement of the male Algerian hero for that of the female Algerian heroine should not go unmentioned. This perhaps is the sharpest critique that the ballet puts forth in my estimations for it asks that in replacing the commonplace with the extraordinary it requires that we look back at the historical record and recognize the crucial role that women played in the actual struggle for independence and the subsequent cycles of violence that women continued to undergo after the exile of the French post-1962. By placing women at the center of the vanguard movement we must contend with this deliberate erasure as well as the invisible misogynist structures reproduced by the FLN and subsequent political parties in power since the revolution. What this piece then asks us to question perhaps is the historical failures of the revolution of realizing in full the promises of an Algeria for Algerians or put in a more radical sense, who exactly gets counted as an Algerian and whose rights get fully actualized in the new republic? What is depicted on stage is not so much what happened universally across the country but instead focuses sharply on almost exceptional instances of women standing alongside men in the battlefronts. This by no means set women up equally against their fellow male fighters which is now amended by this allegorical reconfiguration onstage. I would like to here to bring us back to references to The Battle of Algiers which proposes a similar sensational idea of women in the battle field. There is a symbolic battle fought between French and Algerians about the role of women and their subsequent treatment and mistreatment in each society without any significant material changes in either camp. This battle over women’s autonomy was rather used as cannon fodder for the vilification of both camps which is ultimately embodied by the female airport and café bombers in the film. I proceed cautiously with my suggestions about female empowerment and centrality to the struggle because of its potential revisionist qualities. While it might be unfair to qualify both My Freedom, Algeria and The Battle of Algiers as sensational revisionist movies I would add to this the potential to superimpose women in the revolutionary project on the level of the aesthetic more than on the level of the political as a gesture of agreement with FLN policies. This in turn takes up back to the reality of women’s treatment inside and outside the army and their subsequent disenfranchisement post-1962. And so, while I see incredible potential to read this ballet as directly critiquing the Algerian struggle for independence as lacking in positive/progressive gender politics I can also see the potential for this ballet to precisely reinforce the propagandist potential for placing women at the center of the revolution in a way that is flattering to the effort which, after all, is predetermined to be a righteous one by its premise. And yet, there is still a lingering question that this ballet poses about the undeniable role that women played and keep playing in the construction and rehearsal of the revolution which cannot be neatly done away by a seemingly coherent revolutionary project. And it might be because of this inaccurate representation of the revolution as a cohesive nationalist body that both-sides-arguments take up space in my mind.

I hope that this comes to the surprise of no one and – I cannot stress this enough – this is a massive spoiler: Zohra is shot by the French and subsequently dies in the battlefield. Her dreams of the revolution, whilst ultimately realized (onstage, to the tune of radio transmissions announcing the official confirmation of Algerian independence) which instills in the dancers a sense of both despair and newfound strength to fight once more. Her death onstage is celebrated by the covering of her body in the greatest of symbolic gestures, the Algerian national flag. By this tragic crossroads in the piece, we have already seen this symbol emerge first as embodied muses wearing the tripartite colors in unison (one in white, one in red, one green). The music swells as the dancers onstage redouble their efforts. Our soloist returns once more to the stage not as solemn or as tragic as before but rather is revitalized and inspired. Her dancing is triumphant and empowered. The troops surround her as she twirls and turns across the stage which fully realizes the revolutionary project. The dancers vacate the space, the lights go dark, a small crowd gathers around a small radio. Joyous video of crowds fills up the background and in turn dancers rise and celebrate and take up to pray. Our soloist emerges in the background filled up by these triumphant images as soldiers and our white flag muse parade across stage. She engages her fully and they perform a short duet together only to be heralded off stage by the green flag muse brandishing the tricolor flag and twirling across the stage. The flag fills the background as this celebration takes place. Slowly, dancers return to the stage, first in pairs dancing in a mélange of hip hop and contemporary Algerian dancing. They are eventually overtaken by a much greater crowd holding an even greater number of Algerian flags. We can head the crowd slowly picking up the rhythm of the song and clapping alongside the dancers. The music stops in an echo and our soloist returns for one final time. The national anthem plays.

Conflict thus lives in two different realms: the necessary onstage, and the well-understood offstage. This allows for a dual project to take place throughout the course of the ballet. First, we see how violence is enacted upon the Algerian body by means of French brutality. Their bodies are mangled and beaten beyond recognition under French abuses and abductions. This sets the stage for what I have so far been alluding to which is the necessary implementation of violence of stage as a guiding logic for insurrection. Violence here allows for the national concern to be brought dramatically into focus. It explains the struggle for independence which historically is more complicated but that has the advantage of being easily portrayed on stage. It furthermore activates a skin-deep aversion to French colonial rule which is further exacerbated by their aesthetic distinctions from the competing Algerian faction. I find this to be a very affecting strategy that immediately asks you to root for the Algerian struggle in the moment. This gives way for offstage violence and in turn of self-preservation. What this looks like is complicated by its very premise which, as it has been described above relies solely on an almost imperceptible fade to black right before the radio announcements on stage. The struggle has already been depicted as triumphant on stage following the sudden murder of Zohra on stage and as such needs to go no further than that. I would like to suggest that this secondary sort of violence is of an extraordinary nature. Rather than glorifying it onstage, the bloody violent struggle quickly and effortlessly happens offstage only to be muted by the sounds of the ratification of the republic as an independent state. This quick fade needs not be rehearsed on stage. It perhaps is too violent to be taken up and embodied by the dancers when one death has already felt like enough. If anything, our martyr Zohra has in her death rehearsed the many deaths suffered by the Algerian people in their struggle for independence. I see this violence operating on the level of something tacitly understood perhaps in the sense of what must be done in revolutionary times that in its rehearsal might bring back more than what is intended onstage. As such, that does not take up space in this ballet. It happens, and all members of the audience understand it to be so. It might be possible then to think about the revolutionary rehearsal as a sort of cathartic experience in which the singular death of Zohra and the triumph of the revolution help paper over the unspoken reality of any revolutionary effort which has been something that I have also been trying to understand. Can we see the revolution not simply as a historical event but as a cathartic device that allows for the processing of secondary traumas that go without saying? I am here returning to one of my previous concerns about this ballet depicting the Algerian revolution and not more pressing and present violent realities for the Algerian population. Does this ballet, in bringing together an imaginary Algeria for all Algerians, cathartically exculpate the people from recent violent turmoil? I will not pretend to have any of the answers to this, but my suspicion is that the revolution is both the revolution and the revolution. Like other national symbols, it serves the purpose of interpellating an us to which to refer to while simultaneously implying an outside other which is nonetheless dynamic. It is dynamic, like all social abstractions, by its placelessness – its continuous complementarity without origin. This is both generative and dangerous which is perhaps why any Algerian ballet celebrating the revolution must inevitably end with a clear and ideal portrayal of the national citizen that signs the national anthem and respects the flag. It all comes together in a way that is much more akin to classic ballet than to contemporary ballet.

I return for one last time to one of my central questions, how do we talk about art that complies to well-rehearsed hegemonic culture? I have so far attempted to read this object and embody its logics of encounter and production, but I cannot say whether this has been as successful as it could be. What I have hopefully achieved with this essay is the introduction to one of the central case studies for why we should investigate the development and rehearsal of ballet in Algeria and in the rest of the post-colonial world not simply as a colonial vestige but more fundamentally as an extension of what it means to create Algerian art that speaks to the concerns and interests of Algerians while simultaneously asking critical questions about what these works might offer up with regards to the dynamic fluidity of the nation and what it means for us to continue to think through a nationalist lens in the age of post-colonial nation. This ballet serves then as a space where the nation can be rehearsed teleologically whilst simultaneously asking important questions about the role of women in a post-1962 world and in so doing pointing to the failures of the revolutionary project. This is done stealthily by embracing the overt figure of the fervent Algerian military ballerina which is ultimately consumed by the revolution that she sought to pursue and from where the Algerian struggle is reinvigorated. There are many more places where this ballet can take us but I will leave us with this last question: what do we make of state-first art and how do we talk about it?