‘That could have happened to me’ – Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui brings a story of grief and belonging to Edinburgh

One pairing is Cherkaoui himself, and the father he drifted away from aged 15, when his parents divorced. The other is Ihsane Jarfi, a 32-year-old Belgian man murdered in a brutal homophobic attack in 2012, and the bereaved father he left behind. “The starting point was really the loss of my father, who died when I was 19,” explains Cherkaoui. ”I had a very complicated relationship with him, so I didn't go to his funeral because I was very self-centred back then and wasn't worried about what my family needed of me. I had branched out and was creating my whole identity and journey on my own. But 30 years later, I regret not going, not having him see what became of me. So the performance, in a way, is a ritual. It's trying to embody the memories.”

What “became of” Cherkaoui, as he says, is he grew up to become one of the world’s finest contemporary dance choreographers, winning copious awards. The fact that the young man born four years after him, in the same country, to parents of the same nationality, endured a very different fate, is not lost on Cherkaoui.

“I didn't know Ihsane Jarfi, but when I read about his murder in the news I remember being struck by two things,” he recalls. “Firstly, my identification with him because we were roughly the same age, and he also had a Belgian mother and a Moroccan father. There was an interchangeability, because he was a queer man battered to death by four Belgians. That could have happened to me.

“And I also remember being shocked and angered by the way the newspapers reported it. All they focussed on was the supposed unwelcomeness of a gay man in the Muslim community, saying he wasn’t accepted. But that wasn’t the story – he was killed because of homophobia and maybe even racism, so why weren’t they addressing Flemish society's issues and problems? Then, a couple of months after Ihsane died, his father Hassan – who was a religious teacher – started the Ihsane Jarfi Foundation Against Homophobia. And I was like, where are the journalists now?”

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Creating a show about his own Moroccan heritage is one thing, but when Cherkaoui decided to incorporate Jarfi’s story into the piece, a certain sensitivity was required. A connection with the young man’s father and sister was forged, and binding these two threads together felt plausible and right. “The two stories fused because I felt like I lost my father and Hassan lost his son,” says Cherkaoui. “Ihsane Jarfi also loved to dance, so when I met Hassan he said it felt as if his son was talking through me. And for me, it was the other way around – I saw a father who had done all this for his child, and I wondered if my father would have done the same for me if I had died, and I think he would have. I invited Hassan and his wife to Geneva for the last couple of weeks when I was working on the show, and they were very, very moved by it.”

For almost two decades, Cherkaoui has been running his own dance company, Eastman in Antwerp. Meanwhile, since 2022, he has also been artistic director of the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève in Switzerland. When he began work on Ihsane, he brought dancers from both companies together, leading to an interesting melting pot.

“There's definitely an alternative approach to working with dancers who are inside an institution, compared to freelancers who jump into a project for the passion of it,” says Cherkaoui. “But at the same time, we’re all just human beings. The dancers eventually started to trust each other, and saw how much they could learn from one another, then it became a beautiful experience. Ihsane is about belonging, but it's also about discovering your own roots. So I was really interested in blurring the lines between my own knowledge and ignorance, with that of the people in both companies.”

For Cherkaoui, the coming together of dancers from around the world with Middle Eastern culture posed an interesting challenge. Arabic rhythms demand a different way of counting than contemporary dancers are used to, but he was keen to “give it my own twist and bring this traditional form into the 21st century.” Tunisian music director, Jasser Haj Youssef played a pivotal role in this, incorporating sounds from Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and more, to demonstrate the musical diversity of the Arab world.

“I had been following Jasser’s work for a long time,” says Cherkaoui. “And there's something about the way he approaches music that connects different cultures. He creates a musical bridge between East and West. And even with contemporary compositions, he uses specific tonalities that are actually quite classical or even medieval.” Four musicians and two vocalists will accompany the dancers live on stage, but non-Arabic speakers be warned – there will be no surtitles or programme notes to enlighten you as to what they’re singing. A deliberate decision made by Cherkaoui to evoke memories of his past.

“I grew up in Belgium as a white kid, but in the evening I would have to go to the Islam school, so I was raised as a Muslim too,” he says. “I didn't understand the language, and as a child I remember feeling very lost, but at the same time absorbing a lot of mystery. And I wanted to expose the audience, and the dancers, to this too. So that's why I don't translate the songs. It’s not because I don't think you should understand them, but as a child I didn't know what was being said. So I too have been inside this environment of extreme beauty, but also extreme mystery.”

Ihsane, Festival Theatre, 18-20 August. www.eif.co.uk

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