Word, Movement, Sound, Music (Zero Degrees by Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui)

Word

Question: If we are each other’s mirrors, why do we fight?
Answer: Because we break the mirror.
Question: But why?
Answer: Because we do not like the image it returns to us.
Question: But isn’t that a waste of time? The image is human; the function of the mirror is to make you look human.
Answer: Wrong question and pathetic analysis. The function of the mirror is to return the compliment, nothing less, nothing more.
Question: But…
Answer: No buts, time to go to your cell.

Movement

You raise your right hand at the same time I raise my left one. You speak my words and I speak yours. Your green skin blends with my turquoise one. You hoist your knee at the same time I hoist mine.

There’s still hope.

Sound

There’s a man in the Immigration Control Office. He is trying to explain to the official there that he has got the correct documentation to cross the border. The official is not paying any attention. He is only focused on the man’s lips. Too thick. On the man’s hands. Too fine. On the man’s voice. Too articulate. On the man’s skin colour. Too different. On the man’s mannerisms. Too different. On the man’s hair. Too different. Everything about this man is different.

Finally the official rises and motions the man to stop talking. He leans over his desk, examines the man’s passport and stamps his thoughts down. ‘No Entry’.

Music

Once there was a cricket that refused to rub his wings to make music just like the other crickets. One day he turned up in the middle of a crickets’ concert with a fiddle. He didn’t know how to play it but vowed to learn it. The only request he had was that he be allowed to join the orchestra once he finished his training. They refused to accept him and sent him away from their colony. Years after the cricket came back, already a famous violinist and gave a concert to the whole community. He was praised greatly, but at the crack of dawn he left, never to be seen again. Since then, everyone has been trying to find the cricket that plays the fiddle.

Copyright 2008