'Far...' is a journey of discovery and distress

Rachid Ouramdane's evocative dance movements included rolling on the stage. (julieta cervantes)

Rachid Ouramdane's artistic creativity centers not so much on expressing himself as on giving voice to the lives of others. He has a fascination with unveiling the layers implicit in forging a sense of identity in an often violent world in which "geo-cultural upheaval" makes us all foreigners.

In his provocative, challenging "Far. . .,"which Ouramdane presented last night at the ICA in his Boston debut, the French multimedia artist examines identity through the complicated nexus of Indochina. The piece unfolds through a series of video interviews and live solo performance combining dance, theater, music, and an evocative sound design that ranges from a childlike song to the rumble of a train across a bumpy trestle. The work is darkly intense, sometimes powerful, but often puzzlingly incoherent. Even at only an hour, it's a lot of work to sit through.

"Far. . ." was inspired by a journey to Vietnam and Cambodia to retrace the wartime experiences of Ouramdane's father, an Algerian conscript in the French Army during France's occupation of Algeria and Vietnam. We hear his father's story mostly through the voice and video image of Ouramdane's mother, who recounts the torture her husband endured and the atrocities he experienced during the French occupation of Vietnam. She also recalls her own horrific family experiences while detained in Algeria. Ouramdane stands still in the dim light, as if processing her words, gradually working into slow movement across the floor, rolling, kneeling, lying down.

The long opening seems slow, almost static, yet too direct in its graphic descriptions, and the French text, for those not fluent, means forgoing the "whole picture" visual for the constant reading of surtitles on the back wall. Then the video offers other voices, other faces telling different stories that pull in the more recent history of American involvement in Vietnam. "It's not just the history of a country, it was our family's history," says one voice. A young Vietnamese-American man finds his identity only after letting go of his family's tragic past, feeling liberated by accepting home as "nowhere, but everywhere at the same time." Gradually, we start to appreciate the profound impact the violence of war has on those who live through it. Ouramdane searches for the universal in the particular.

When Ouramdane speaks, the words tumble in a kind of stream of consciousness flow of poetic images and surreal, almost absurdist juxtapositions. More effective is when he dances, letting throbbing, heavy-metal guitar send his body into frenetic, contorted isolations that look like break dance jolted by high voltage current. When he takes off his black shirt and wraps it over his head like the hood of a condemned prisoner, the reference is chilling.

Ultimately, Ouramdane asks a lot of questions he doesn't help us answer. But they're questions that examine the very core of who we are in a world dominated by conflict. How does the violence of war impact our personal sensibilities, and does it eventually make us foreign even to ourselves?