klapping
A nocturnal pilgrimage to an out-of-bounds football court. Synchronised breathing, ritual dances, obscure football history, acclamations, refrains and Cruyffian* technique.
Flirting with a scary boundary between fiction and reality, Klapping is a new urban movement form founded by Feras the Shield and Maestro Ahil. They initiate the audience into this strange, but familiar, new form; Starting with its history, moving through foundations and fashion codes and arriving at the euphoria of a battle, over the course of the evening the audience is initiated, beginning their transformation towards football deity. By bathing/immersing in football paraphernalia and reveling in the energy of the court, Feras the Shield and Maestro Ahil guide the audience through this search for profound spiritual significance in the idiosyncratic codes and rituals of football.
*Cruyffian refers to concepts developed by the late, Dutch, footballer, Johan Cruyff.
WHAT
Klapping is an experience for an audience of between 1 and 60 people. It takes place on a football-court, or failing that an interesting urban space. Klapping is part-workshop, part-initiation, part-performance lecture, part mid-night jam. It is a community infiltration and a concept piece. The audience gets initiated into this new, fictional, street dance, guided by the two artists, Ahilan Ratnamohan and Feras Shaheen and a group of ‘Reserves’* from the city the piece is being performed in. Over the course of this, roughly, one and a half hour experience, the audience-participants get inducted into the Klapping family, eventually becoming ‘Youth’* through the initiation which involves learning a number of physical and cultural aspects of Klapping.
The performance is preceded by a period of community engagement and infiltration, whereby Ahilan and Feras take up residence on the court acquainting themselves with the locals who frequent it. In addition to this they run Klapping workshops with local footballers and dancers, in order (a) to continue to proliferate the dance form and (b) to find potential ‘Reserves’ to execute the initiation with them. During this time they continue to mythologise Klapping by making two new social media teaser and trailer videos for a local Klapper. These videos also serve the purpose of promoting the project for the arts centre. There is also the option to do a Klapping Fashion workshop with the designers from Klapping, Anne-Catherine Kunz. Read below for further information on all of these aspects.
BACKGROUND
In 2017, commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre, Ahilan Ratnamohan and Feras Shaheen founded a new dance style which they named Klapping. It was a fictionalised dance style which they attempted to synthesise and bring to life, going completely against their normal organic development. They were obsessed with the way street-dances are created (often out of a social urge) and then sustained (through the building of a community and proliferation via documentaries, dance videos and mythologizing).
And so Klapping too grew out of a social urge. Ahilan’s desire as a footballer to be able to escape the rigid confines of the footballer’s body and methodical, movements and ways of holding our bodies which get drilled into us. To just let it all go, but to not deny what we are at the end of the day: footballers.
In 2018 while getting ready to present a first incarnation of the project at Nuit Blanche Festival (Brussels), they got serious about Klapping. They analysed existing urban dances meticulously, mining these sub-cultures for the necessary and possible aspects, which could enhance Klapping.
They looked at the dance style itself and developed an index of movements, creating ‘treatments’ and ‘forms’ (to complement the existing repertoire of ‘moves’, which they already had at their disposal). They, together with costume designer, Anne-Catherine Kunz, invented a new dress-style which would suit the new form. They considered what it would be to create a new genre of music specifically for this style of dance, but due to time and productional restraints they weren’t able to pursue this. They looked at the hierarchies in Krump and created a Klapping-specific hierarchy. The semblance to the plethora of existing street dances is uncanny, yet everything is drawn from football culture and movement.
During this creation period, the pair worked regularly in the neighbourhood, La Marolles, in which they were to present the piece during Nuit Blanche. They drew a lot of the inspiration for the initiation-performance from this engagement.
In short Klapping is a synthesized street-dance, based on the general cultural structures of existing urban dances but grounded in football culture and movement.
Performer/Devisors | Ahilan Ratnamohan, Feras Shaheen
Costume Design-Outside Eye | Anne-Catherine Kunz
First Development Dramaturgy | Kristof Persyn
Campbelltown Arts Centre commission, Nuit Blanche, A Cultured Left Foot co-production, with support from MAF WIP COOP, Monty & Ontmoetingscentrum Luchtbal
KLAPPING has been supported by ArtsNSW.
DATES
17 Oct 2017 MAF WIP COOP, Antwerp BE work-in-progress
2 Oct 2018 Ontmoetingscentrum Luchtbal, Antwerp BE tryout
6 Oct 2018 Nuit Blanche, Brussels prémiere
30 March 2019 Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney AU
5, 6 Sep 2019 Homo Novus Festival, Riga LV
7 Sep 2019 Dansart Festival, Kortrijk BE
15-17 May 2020 Zürich Tanzt, CH. corona cancel
Sep 2020 - Kaaitheater, Brussel BE season-long
13, 14 Feb 2021 New Annual Festival, Newcastle AU
7 - 9 May 2021 Zürich Tanzt, CH corona cancel
24 Sep 2021 Kaaitheater, Brussels BE
26 Sep 2021 Stormopkomst, Turnhout BE
25, 26 June 2022 Danse Élargie, Paris FR showcase
17 Sep 2022 Dear Antwerp / De Singel, Antwerp BE
19, 20 May 2023 ZürichTanzt, Zürich CH
9, 10 June 2023 About Us! Festival, Zürich CH
26 Aug 2023 Internationales Sommerfestival, Hamburg DE
27 Oct 2023 Deutscher Fußball-Kulturpreis 2023 showcase
Nürnberg DE