What the Day Owes to the Night has been touring internationally for 12 years.Supplied
Title: What the Day Owes to the Night
Choreographer: Hervé Koubi
Company: Compagnie Hervé Koubi
Produced by: Luminato Festival, TO Live and Fall for Dance North
Venue: Bluma Appel Theatre
City: Toronto
Year: To June 21, 2025
An ensemble of a dozen bare-chested men cluster on stage, alternately tumbling, twisting, flying. One man backflips in a stupefying sequence worthy of the Olympics. Another spins on his head with inconceivable speed. For the 75 minutes of Compagnie Hervé Koubi’s What the Day Owes to the Night, we are transported to a world where bodies parachute through the air and corkscrew on the spot as if these feats were as natural as walking.
In a brief introduction to the piece, the Cannes-born Koubi relayed that he doesn’t hire trained performers, but street dancers from around the Mediterranean basin, many of whom appear on stage for the first time. This can explain the thrilling sense that we’ve stumbled upon a covert subculture where men communicate through lunges, drops and acrobatic lifts.
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At times, the capoeira-infused choreography makes the troupe look like ancient warriors, going to battle and burying their dead. A stunning sequence in which one man is lifted by the ensemble, tossed into the air and laid down amid a cluster of folded bodies creates the effect of a funeral rite. Other times, with hips wrapped in sheet-like skirts, the men look like slaves, their muscular movements representing the forced labour by which they live. And sometimes they seem utterly ordinary – a bunch of bros enjoying some downtime as they recline in the sun.
Street dancing depends on its ability to draw people away from their ordinary preoccupations and hold their attention. Part of the fun of watching Koubi’s work is being at one with the crowd, sensing everyone hold their breath at moments of gravity-defying peril, then sigh collectively when the moment resolves. What the Day Owes to the Night, which has been touring internationally for 12 years, is above all a crowd-pleaser. And the audience at Toronto’s Bluma Appel Theatre on Thursday night couldn’t hide their pleasure, oohing and aahing at spectacular pinnacles and leaping to their feet at the curtain call.
It’s hard not to be pleased by this extreme of physical beauty and agility, sculpted bodies tumbling and soaring through space with apparent effortlessness. But I wonder whether seasoned dance fans will be more divided. There are certainly moments of poetic intensity in Koubi’s piece, the men running to the haunting sound of an oud, or paused as bits of Vivaldi are incorporated into the score, music that conjures the diverse influences on North African culture. But there’s a thematic fuzziness that keeps the work at an emotional remove.
Flashes of narrative never quite land or deepen our engagement with the action. Sequences feel reprised instead of built upon – I was never quite sure where we were going or why. The piece ends with a dancer speaking several lines in Arabic– a beautiful moment that remains inscrutable. His unaccompanied voice is like the last ribbon of smoke of an extinguished fire, rising alone in stillness, but dispersing before we’ve understood.
In fact, I felt most emotionally engaged when Koubi spoke as a preface to the piece. Charming and direct, he explained that he’d grown up thinking he was as French as they come, until his father revealed that both he and his mother are Algerian – he Jewish and she Muslim. The revelation prompted him to look into his past, and formed the foundation of the work.
When Koubi reminded us that Jews, Muslims and Christians lived together in peace for centuries across Northern Africa, I felt the room hold its breath. Given today’s world, and us weary readers of distressing headlines, the reminder was as staggering as Koubi’s most jaw-dropping suspensions. Here’s hoping we’ll breathe some relief.
