Orbo Novo

Choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

Invited by artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui created Orbo Novo ('the New World') for NY based Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet. The performance translates his feelings of freedom, confinement, connection and loneliness in NYC, his confrontation with America, the 'New World' and its incredible energy. It also underlines the common ancestors and the common heritage between Europeans and Americans.

Orbo Novo thrives on the direction the U.S.A. was taking politically in 2009, when the piece was created, the sense of a new found openness for the rest of the world. Still, in this piece, the hope is translated through a certain feeling of melancholy and through meditation. It speaks as much about coming together as of breaking away from one another. Szymon Brzóska's complex scores give soul to the intricate flowing movements of the gifted dancers.

The text of A Stroke of Insight, a book written by Jill Bolte Taylor, is used in the piece to speak about the contrast between immediate sensory experience (the now) and memory and projection (past and future). It explains how through immediate sensory experience one can be more in sync and more at peace, more at one with the universe around you.

The set is composed by 4 movable structures on which the dancers can climb or crawl through. The borders are there, but permeable. You can't make them disappear, but you can move them anywhere you want. And if you can't get through something in order to move forward, take it along until you CAN get through. Resilience happens by doing, not only through thinking.