Muhammed Kaltuk is a choreographer who was hitherto unknown to me, as I suspect also to the vast majority of dance afficionados outside of Switzerland. Kaltuk discovered hip-hop at the age of 14 and formed his own company, MEK, in Hemmige exhibits his rare gift of making dance through a movement language that appears fresh and not in any way recycled. The hip-hop elements flavour the movement rather than overwhelm it. My gender identification is deliberately fluid since Kaltuk insisted that the roles were not gender specific.
Over the season of performances in Luzern, several dancers took these lead roles but on this night they were performed by a guest dancer, Emma Spinosi from Brittany who has been a member of Rambert 2 she is a graduate of the Rambert School and Ballet Preljocaj, and company dancer Ching Heng Huang, formerly a dancer with Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan.
The eclectic range of skills provided by his Taiwanese training was very much in evidence. Another sense of identity failure was provided by some dancers wearing stockings, bank-robber style, over their heads. The most idiosyncratic otherness came via the music. A bespoke electronic score that pulsed with hi-energy beats was created by Gabriel Mareque, another young Swiss innovator who started out training in dance before crossing over into musical composition.
But the quirkiness came from a Swiss-German singer-songwriter-poet who died more than 50 years ago tragically in a car crash on his way to a concert, aged just Half a century later, Mani Matter is still a household name in the Bernese-German speaking areas of Switzerland.
His songs are routinely used to teach primary school children the dialect of those cantons and two of them are embedded and repeated in the music, including the one from which the title is derived the other is mir hei e verein or my name is club. Without understanding any of it myself my own sense of otherness , it seems that he sung, accompanying himself on the guitar, exclusively in the Bernese dialect, using repetitive rhyming couplets that are often untranslatable.
