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.

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There are times, viewing Justine Cooper’s art, that you laugh to split your sides and then twist suddenly away, struck with absolute horror. You tend to get that when an artist presents surgically incisive and viscerally immersive work about bodies ‘living’ on the borders of life.

With conceptual elegance and often blistering wit, Cooper’s work — which has been shown and praised from Shanghai MOMA to Ars Electronica to the Centre Pompidou — has confronted power and femininity in pharmaceutical ‘correctives’ to ‘emotional imbalance’ (Havidol 2007) by staging her own fully viable, if teasingly parodic ad campaign.

A few years before, as the resident artist of New York’s Museum of Natural History, she had unprecedented access to their extensive storerooms and collections, examining technologies of preservation — like taxidermy and museums themselves — that alter given boundaries of life, death and artificial, performed naturalness and producing Saved by Science, a clinical and overwhelming but oddly touching series of portraits of suspended life.

Opening today in New York, Justine Cooper’s new series Terminal will be up alongside Lamina and RAPT — full-body MRI self-portraits. The new work speaks volumes on its own, but then again, what’s better than hearing it straight from the artist?

Read on for our interview with the eloquent and insightful Justine Cooper.

Gallery and opening intel here.

TRACE: What is unique about this series compared to your other work?
Justine Cooper: The new series of medical simulation mannequins and robots (Terminal 2008) [used for training doctors] relates to my other work in its probing of our relationship to science and medicine in a technologically advanced society.

Like anatomically correct, overgrown Ken and Barbie dolls, these mannequins are given a plot line to act out, in a story of someone else’s devising. The result is they grow into their own histories, in the same way we present ourselves — relating our personal lives through blogs.

Re-invention takes place through the medium of social networking. Their stories mimic our own; our choices of the parts that punctuate the daily ritual — the new baby, the island holiday, the head wound.

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Glass Candy makes good mood music to chill to, dance to, mack to. Yes - it’s good for that mood, too. I first heard Glass Candy at the end of a late night last year as the DJ spun whatever he wanted for the last of us, lounging on club furniture as if it were our own and refusing to go home. That song, “Rolling Down the Hills,” was heady and atmospheric, enough to disorient and make me want more as I decided to leave and not be the last girl standing when all the lights came on.

Singer Ida No, producer Johnny Jewel and drummer Dusty Sparkles are the Portland trio behind Glass Candy’s contemporary disco/electro sound. While they can channel Blondie circa “Rapture” and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at times, they also have fun being themselves and working hip-hop, disco, rock and punk beats into a just-right Glass Candy groove.

Tonight, Glass Candy continues their maiden voyage to the UK with a stop at London’s Cargo with DJ/Producer/Label Owner Mike Simonetti on the turntables. The multi-titled impresario behind the Italians Do It Better label, to which Glass Candy is signed, is bound to heat things up before Glass Candy washes you down with that groove. Sure to end some peoples into the street swooning.

For a taste of Glass Candy, click here and for tix to tonight’s Cargo show, click here.

Cargo
83 Rivington St
Kingsland Viaduct
Shoreditch
£12