EVENING NEWS

Arabs step out in style

CARACALLA DANCE: Sadler’s Wells

This large company, formed in Lebanon six years ago by Abdul Halim Caracalla, gave few clues during its Wells season in 1978 of the exotic theatrical riches it had yet to offer.

When I read the advance publicity describing the current season’s production about the great Arab revolt against the Turks in 1910-17 that inspired Lawrence of Arabia, my heart sank.

Another exuberant but interminable series of ethnic dances, I anticipated grimly, and probably with as much relevance to real-life Arab folk as John Hanson and Co. shaking sand from between their toes in The Desert Song. I was wrong!

In the two years since these likeable Lebanese were last here, they have grown up, although they still have far to go.

Yet, the company’s Western-style flair for dramatic theatricality is no accident.

Founder-choreographer, Caracalla trained in Paris and with the London School of Contemporary Dance, while artistic adviser, Bert Stimmel is a graduate of Martha Graham’s modern dance school in New York.

Between them, they have concocted not a folk-dance pageant but a genuine dance-drama.

Two strong scenes remain in the memory: the military encampment where Three Turkish soldiers raper a local girl.
And the party scene at a rich Arabian actress’s villa.

A show as ambitious as this inevitably has its structural weakness. But it boasts style, panache and glamour and is a sincere attempt, in Arab terms, to say something new.

See it!

Ian Woodward
18 September 1980