Choreographing Movement as ‘Double Critique’ in Bouchra Ouizguen’s ‘Corbeaux’

Abstract

This article analyzes movement in and around Bouchra Ouizguen’s dance performance ‘Corbeaux’ (2014) through the conceptual framework of Abdelkabir Khatibi’s ‘double critique’. The article explores how ‘Corbeaux’ choreographs its reenactment of the hal Sufi traditional head movement and how this choreography epistemically emerges as a ‘double critique’ or a crisis of both the immobilizing sacred pastness of this movement and the Orientalist constructions when dance and the dancing body are relentlessly subjected. The article clarifies that while inviting a dialogue between Western theories of Dance Studies and Khatibi’s decolonial method of ‘double critique,’ ‘Corbeaux’ prompts its reader / spectator not to romanticize either the dance or the dancing body since neither should disavow subjection to global capital. The article indeed complicates Khatibi’s conception of doubleness through the doubleness of dance as a space of both reenactment and customization of the Sufi archive which the dance reenacts within the choreography of global market mobility.