EVENING STANDARD

Warlords of the dance

One performer was killed by sniper fire, another paralysed by a bullet. But the Caracalla Dance Theatre survived the battle horror of Lebanon and tonight they make their London debut.

During the war in Lebanon, normal life stopped for everyone - apart from a troupe of 40 or so dancers and its indomitable leader, As the country was being bombarded, the Caracalla Dance Theatre went about its business as usual. Even if that meant going underground. Art, it insisted, was mightier than the sword.

Tonight the company opens its lively new show, Elissa, Queen of Carthage, based on the Phoenician legend of Dido and Aeneas, at London’s Peacock Theatre - with no visible sign of the years of trauma spent scurrying from safe zone to safe zone for no other reason than to dance.

There is peace now, and has been for six years. Beirut, once known as the Paris of the East, is vibrant again and being rebuilt. But for 17 years this fresh and energetic company refused to be intimidated. Its founder and choreographer, Abdul Halim Caracalla, says: “I felt I had to work to save the image of my country. I had the power to tour and could go into the world with the message of art, which is stronger than the message of politics.”

For a long time, the message was not heard. So why carry on? Why not flee into the mountains like everyone else? Anna Maria Caracalla, a former dancer now married to Caracalla’s brother Omar, also a dancer, believes Caracalla would never have surrendered. “He is like a Russian dictator and we were his soldiers,” she says. A man who has been a choreographer for 30 years is used to giving orders.

Caracalla believed his upbringing in the Bekaa valley prepared him for his two decades of defiance. “I am fro Baalbeck and the hard snow. I was born into difficult conditions.”

Inevitably, the war took its toll. A male dance was killed by sniper fire in Beirut and a female dancer was fired on while travelling in a car. A bullet paralysed her, ending her career.

It was the company’s destiny to survive, Caracalla says, and dismisses his extraordinary role as author of that destiny. Even before the war, he was famous in the Middle East for his unique dance style that synthesised the beautiful fluency of Oriental gestures with the earthy power of western modern dance.

He was admired for founding the Middle East’s only dance company and for creating as its style a modern version of an ancient civilisation. He was also respected by all of Lebanon’s combustible mix of people for having no political or religious allegiances.

Everyone in the land felt they had a stake in his company. It became a symbol: if Caracalla survived, all would survive. Fierce enemies made an unspoken pact to shield the dancers. “The soldiers protected us, moving us from place to place. They encouraged us all the way and told us to keep going.”

The company lived like a band of gypsies, leaping from city to city in Lebanon, even from country to country. Iran, Iraq, Libya, Morocco and Algeria - some of them enemies but all united in pride over the cultural reawakening Caracalla had wrought - adopted the troupe as representatives of their nation and offered a safe haven for months on end.

Anna Maria Caracalla says the war brought the young dancers closer together. “We all had the same experiences and the pain of leaving our parents with no contact for weeks. There were no telephones that we could use; we didn’t have enough cloths, or enough of anything, so we would go shopping together. We ate all our meals together, sometimes ordering takeaway pizza for 40.”

The last phase of the war was the most destructive. Two Christian factions unleashed a bitter battle in east Beirut, and the company fled to Baalbeck, a Hizbollah stronghold. However, because Caracalla was raised in the shadow of Baalbeck’s magnificent Roman ruins, the fundamentalists turned a blind eye to the dancing they regarded as decadent.

So for the last part of the war, Caracalla returned home. His father was director of the ruined temples of Bacchus and Jupiter. But as a child, something in addition to the mysticism of the imposing ruins was implanted in Caracalla. Art flourished there. Every year, international artists would perform on the floodlit steps of the ruined temple. The young boy was taken to see these shows.

At 18, the artistic influences began to show. At the time, he was an accomplished pole-vaulter, proud of his skill, accuracy and technique in propelling his wiry body through the air. But then he saw Rudolf Nureyev flying through the air and spinning not once but twice before landing.

“I tried it at home and could not do what Nureyev did. This frustrated me,” he says. So he came to London and enrolled at the London Contemporary Dance School, which the philanthropist Robin Howard was setting up to import the dance of Martha Graham to Britain.

The next year, 1968, he returned to Lebanon and set up the dance company based on the fluency of the Orient and the power of Graham’s dance. “Graham technique helped me to create a new art form in the language of dance. The marriage of East and West in the body gives birth to a broader language.”

Caracalla’s style has a dazzling logic. Graham started her dance studies with Ruth St Denis, an American modern dance pioneer with a reputation for Oriental exoticism. Graham herself drew on forms of yoga. Eastern influences were absorbed into the first true American dance. Caracalla amalgamated that American dance into Arabic origins to create an organic, rich and unique style that even a long war could not destroy.

Anne Sacks
12 November 1996