Violence, conflict and who we are all converge in French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane’s work to show how we can or cannot, do or do not find a sensitivity within ourselves in this cruel world. The choreographer, of Algerian descent, is one of France’s top young choreographers contemplating self and searching for different ways to show this journey through various multimedia elements.

A true transcultural, Ouramdane performs his new show, “Far…” May 8-10 at New York’s Dance Theater Workshop. Having already made its way across stages in Europe, Ouramdane’s show features his Algerian father’s journals, kept during the French occupation of Algeria and later while a soldier in the French army stationed in Indochina — today’s Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam — to explore how identity is questioned and shaped. Ouramdane’s solo performance also investigates cultural home, and conflict, two themes that recur in his work.

I recently spoke with Ouramdane about “Far…“, as he prepared to fly out to New York for his show.

More information about the show here.

TRACE hooks you up with a pair of complimentary tickets to any performance of “Far…” — email us to claim ‘em here.

TRACE: Why did you decide to take the trip to Vietnam?
Rachid Ouramdane: I wanted to follow my father’s journey as an Algerian soldier in the French army. He was sent to Indochina, which was also a French colony, to fight against those who were colonized by the French, just like him.

After reading his journal, I decided to collect interviews with the people he met and see how colonial occupation influenced their sense of identity today.

The people I met there and the people who I found to speak to me were used to speaking about colonization or had grown up overseas and come back so they were open. Those not wanting to speak about their path said they had no memory. It was interesting to confront those kinds of memories — the official and the non-official, which is the one you cannot speak about today.

T: In what ways have ideas of foreignness affected your work?
RO: It is not only about being foreign but the constant re-evaluation of what we are. The concept of identity is a work in progress. We always have to face our past and redefine who we are.

In interviews with the Vietnamese, I tried to understand and reach some specificity about what we use to define ourselves. We often define ourselves through nationality, but what does that mean when you grow up in America with a strong idea of another culture? It means one thing until you go to your home culture and you realize, “Oh, I’m an American.” I wanted to see what it meant to belong to an identity and to a culture.

We are involved in a culture of globalization where our cultures are more connected. How society today is shaped is diverse and non-uniform. Immigration and movement defines our environment and involves a lot of people in the world today. In Europe you don’t meet the same immigrant communities as in the U.S. but the dynamics of coming from one culture to join another is the same. These confrontations are happening everywhere today.

T: Your work often questions or deconstructs identity, depicting the conflicts that arise during the process in a harsh manner. Off-stage, do you think these moments of identity questioning and deconstruction always have harsh, sad or negative effects?
RO: I have an obsession with this because there is an autobiographical heritage I want to confront. I want to observe the individual and see how individual souls are able to go on and refocus on them today without being stuck in the past or in nostalgia or history with a capital H.

For me, it is very crucial at the moment. There are many places in the world today that are informed by violence and I’m interested in what is coming out of that violence; how can we find a humanity in it. I focus on portraits of people to see how the soul, after dealing with violence, finds a way to still be human. We started the new century with a lot of tension, a lot of violence so these questions remain pertinent.

T: How does dance tell these stories different from literature or the news?
CO: Literature has its own architecture and [so do] the news and other media; I cannot change what it says. In a sense, I cannot say more and I don’t say more about the reality of the facts presented in the news. But the presence of people on stage is different from the media. As an artist, I observe the sensibility of people and try to recreate the sensitivity of the individual.

Dance can be less general than the media, and present a diversity of its facts through the sensitivity of people. I don’t want to make documentaries but I am interested in seeing how an individual comes to find who he is today.

I don’t see myself as a choreographer in the strict sense, but as a portraitist who observes.

T: Your performances often incorporate multimedia elements. In what ways do you see technology helping dance to tell a story or express an emotion?
RO: Media are democratic today. You don’t have to be a specialist to use any of the different forms of multimedia. What makes it different is how you use it. I focus on what needs to be on stage in front of the viewer. Video, for instance, gives a lot of potential to the form. You can appear at the same moment in different ways through video. In “ Far…” the effect would be to show the importance of the development of a single person and how multiple we are.