Dancer disappears into black hole with 'From Molenbeek with Love'

You'd better live in Molenbeek. For years, tensions have reigned in this Brussels neighbourhood. The no-go area is even directly linked to the Paris and Brussels attacks. Relations among themselves will not be gentle there either.

Dancer/choreographer Yassin Mrabtifi is from there. He must be a dented personality. When I saw the upbeat title of his first own performance, 'From Molenbeek with Love', it raised expectations. Finally a different sound from that hell. But all he appeared to show of himself was victimhood. Someone who doesn't know what identity he can best survive with. The old story, in other words.

Gentle

Yassin Mrabtifi has a gentle nature. He radiated that on stage. Four metal stands, connected by a window of cellophane, formed his small, safe domain. There he mulled over his survival questions. Who he was. How he was. How he needed to be. The cellophane was a mirror in which he looked at his body. But at the same time, he peered through it at the outside world. What did he want to give the audience? A unique, creative way to survive?

Each time he left the square estate in a different way. By far the most beautiful scene was the one in which he crawled into a white robe whose sleeves seemed infinitely long. Via two poles, they extended into the dark ridge of the hall. But the immensity turned out to be a hand-wringer and a straitjacket. Here, Mrabtifi was reminiscent of a dervish. A telling association. After all, a dervish experiences liberation. Unification with the perfect. That may be what Mrabtifi was dreaming of. But depth or wisdom, a mystical or philosophical answer to the question of how people can make life on earth so miserable, dervishhood did not spur him on to that. He only got tangled in the sleeves. With difficulty, he extricated himself from the robe, retreating shyly into his domain, where he tried to make his choice from a variety of ordinary clothes.

Thus, Mrabtifi depicted how he was manipulated by outside forces. And how painful that was.

Trapped

More and more, I found out in successive scenes that he failed to find his bearings at all through changing identities. I got the feeling that the character remained completely locked in his own little world. That he had no rebuttal. That he allowed himself to live in a nest of discontent and rowdiness.

For a moment, there seemed to be a moment of breakout. Mrabtifi tore the cellophane loose from the poles. He waved it around wildly. The shimmering sheet filled the room with a raging rustle. What a release, I thought. Until the dancer became as hopelessly entangled in it as he had been earlier in the white robe. Nice to revisit such a motif, but disappointing that no opening to something new followed.

Solo performance

He wanted to make a solo performance, he said timidly. In the stories he told, nothing but lost and powerlessness came out. What was at the heart of this personality? As an artist, what did he contrast with the unlivable world in Molenbeek? It remains an unsatisfying black hole.

Initially, it was nice how Mrabtifi combined his actions and words with dance movements each time. They seemed to arise spontaneously in his body. But they extinguished each time. Even in his dance art, which nevertheless distinguished him from other victims in Molenbeek and thus gave him a clear identity of his own, he did not manage to trigger liberation.

As a spectator, it was difficult to join in this drama. It remained distant, introspective. After each scene, the dancer retreated. Everything was equally fleeting and flighty. It made you yearn for a personality that offered vision or a view. And that made you look at complicated reality in a new way.