The prize fighter

Former boxer Heddy Maalem takes aim with African-inspired take on dance's 'Rite of Spring'

Dancers from the Compagnie Heddy Maalem perform a scene from "Le Sacre du Printemps" ("The Rite of Spring"). Heddy Maalem and his dance company bring an African perspective to "The Rite of Spring." (Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images)

NEW YORK - On the darkened stage, two dancers tentatively touch each other to the sounds of falling rain and distant thunder. Images of lush scenery appear on a screen behind them. It seems to be daybreak. As the man lifts the woman to his shoulders, a bassoon plays the first, plaintive notes of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring." Then in the brightening light, other dancers in vibrantly hued trunks and tops step forward, breaking into a bouncy two-step. Soon jarring images and the racket of urban congestion usher in an impassioned hourlong dance, with brutal and wrenching movement supplanting the opening idyll.

The French-Algerian choreographer Heddy Maalem brings a unique perspective to his version of "The Rite of Spring." While the dance typically evokes a pagan ritual, Maalem sets the ritual's chaos and violence against the backdrop of contemporary Africa. His company makes its Jacob's Pillow debut with the work Wednesday through June 29.

"The idea for the piece came to me when I visited Lagos more than five years ago," says Maalem, who at 57 still has the physical presence and intensity of the boxer he once was. "It shocked me. It's a big, big city, with enormous energy and intelligence and great despair and violence. The cacophony and the rhythms made me think of 'The Rite of Spring.' It seemed natural to create something to the score with African dancers."

But Maalem wants to go beyond a mere description of modern city life and delve into the area's slave and colonial past. Using film shot in Africa and West African performers familiar with the region's traditional dance, he says he is "exploring what happens when one culture forces itself on another. Though it's strikingly apparent in Africa, my piece isn't only about Africa but about our world."

Maalem's decision as a white man to choreograph performers of color has sometimes been met with criticism, particularly in France. Before a recent performance in New York, Maalem took a seat at the Joyce Theater to oversee his company's crucial two-hour warm-up for the demanding work, and he addressed the charges.

"There can be a complete misunderstanding and ignorance about Africa," he says. "I'm African, as I was born in Algeria. That's where identity gets confused with other things. Your culture is inside you, not in your skin. Just as I carry war inside me because of what I experienced growing up during the French-Algerian war, all West Africans carry wars of colonization within themselves. Yet I've been accused of being an opportunist and manipulative. Why wouldn't I want them for this subject? I choreograph because I think dance can make people understand these things far better than words. We need to observe before we can know others."

If anyone could sympathize with victims of colonialism, it is Maalem. The son of an Algerian lawyer and French mother, he knew conflict and racism firsthand. His father was killed after the French-Algerian war. He doesn't know whether the French or the Algerians were responsible for his father's death, and he still doesn't feel comfortable returning there. But this violent history also set him in his direction as a choreographer. After leaving Algeria and settling in the southern French city of Toulouse, Maalem became a professional boxer and studied the martial art of aikido, only coming to contemporary dance at 28.

"I've always been interested in how movement develops in the body," he says, "how the joints determine how we move and the ways in which we manage the weight of the body, and how we almost move automatically given certain stimulus. These are the things that most concern me when I make a dance, not line or placement."

Maalem established his company in 1990 and from the beginning wrestled with philosophical questions. His "Rite of Spring," which had its world premiere in 2005, is the final part of a trilogy of dances that includes "Black Spring," which deals with questions of identity, and "The Order of Battle," which explores how we survive during a time of pervasive war. He collaborated with filmmaker Benoit Dervaux on each of the trilogy's three parts. Their film "Black Spring" has won awards at festivals around the world.

Ella Baff, executive director of Jacob's Pillow, has been following Maalem's work for some time. "Working with Stravinsky's score tests choreographers' mettle and craft," she says. "They are often drawn to the music, just like actors are drawn to playing the role of Othello. It takes Heddy's level of maturity to deal with its complexity. . . . I like how he makes reference to African vocabulary but doesn't copy it. His dancers know contemporary dance as well as their own traditions, and it's that combination that makes them so exciting to watch. It's a great ensemble."

As a choreographer, Maalem has always been more interested in discovering what his dancers could contribute to his pieces than in what he could impose on them.

"Before I met Heddy," says dancer Qudus Onikeku, "I mostly worked with choreographers who wanted you to copy their movement. But he was different. He wanted us to bring what was already in us. He insists that we be very present in the work. The work's poetry was very evident right away. We just tap into it and take off."

Maalem explains his approach simply. "Because I am a freelance choreographer," he says, "I don't have long periods of times to work with dancers. That's why I have to rely on what they already know and keep the work simple and direct. Perhaps because I came late to dance . . . I'm not like those who first have long performing careers and want their styles on their companies. I didn't dance long enough, and I wasn't that good."

But his background in boxing and Aikido has also been beneficial, he says: "[It] permits me not to focus on the form of the dance, but on the inner energy and the right movement at the right moment. These dancers were sufficiently strong to accept the challenges."