FLEUR D'ORANGE RESIDENCY

We are thrilled and honored that Monkeyhouse is part of a prestigious group of US presenters including the Kennedy Center working with Center Stage to present Fleur d'Orange.  From October 16th-21st Hind Benali, founder of Fleur d'Orange, will be here in Boston performing, leading workshops, talking to artists and meeting the community.  Fleur d'Orange is a contemporary dance company from Casablanca, Morocco.  On this tour they will be visiting Boston, Washington DC and New York City to present a new work,  IDENTITY/IDENTITÉ.

IDENTITY/IDENTITÉ is created and performed in collaboration with Franco-Moroccan hip hop dancer, Soufiane Karim.  The show also includes sound by Mohcine Imrharn and projections by calligraphy by artist Yacine Fadhil.  
“I was trained in ballet, but ballet was too technical and my body wasn’t right. I always knew I had to do something different.” Benali discovered the abstract, conceptual edges of contemporary dance in France. Though she savored the wild and unexpected opportunities contemporary dance afforded, she worried they’d never work back home. “I thought I’d have to give all this up, this life of dance, and wind up behind a desk. Or I’d end up going back to Europe to be a dancer.”

Instead, Benali found an unexpected, very different model for creating a new platform and new audience for contemporary dance. She went to her first African dance festival in Burkina Faso. Dancers there were talented, creative, and hardworking, but had little need for the formal training and European-style infrastructure and funding Benali and many artists around her assumed were required to jumpstart the dance scene back home. The dancers she met and collaborated with in sub-Saharan Africa had a wonderful freedom -- the freedom to create, and to use their roots and limited formal training to express themselves without apology or overreaching critique.

“It was a revolution in the way I watched dance. I started asking myself questions about dancers’ training. I was very academic, old school. But the African dancers around me had a traditional dance background and that was enough to prepare them physically, at least, for a professional dance career,” explains Benali. “I wanted to take that approach to Morocco, stop complaining about our lack of money, about our hard mentality.”
Center Stage is an exchange program of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Exchange programs initiated by the Bureau support U.S. foreign policy goals and engage youth, students, educators, artists, athletes, and rising leaders in the U.S. and more than 160 countries. Center Stage uses the performing arts to support cultural understanding between American and international communities; participating artists experience the U.S. first hand and cultivate lasting relationships.

They will bring seven ensembles from Morocco, Pakistan and Vietnam to the U.S. for month-long tours from June-December 2014, connecting artists with diverse communities across the country. Residencies will include performances, workshops, discussions, people-to-people exchanges, and community gatherings.