La Baraka gathers performers of different artistic and social status, top professionals, but also virtuoso street dancers. The way the group works, in its social aspect, is very similar to the dance theatre of Bruno Beltrao. On Concours National De Paris they won second prize for contemporary dance in 1998. For the moment company La Baraka is in residence at Bonlieu Scene nationale d'Annecy.

Idea for the Allegoria Stanza performance appeared while Abou Lagraa was in Morocco, where he took notes, on the beaches, in the lyric form; astonished, he connects colours, sents, sounds. The wish to create a show that would unite two types of dance grows: hip-hop and contemporary dance, but to preserve the individuality of each in that process. His performance is a dance piece with a contemporary concept that uses the hip-hop vocabulary.

Allegoria Stanza relies on a dynamic opposition: individual - community. The space of the game could be read as mental architecture - lines, surface, mirrors giving rhythm to the spiritual space of seduction and the all-present wish for belonging to the group; but also quarrels because of differences and lust for the affirmation of the identity; homogenization of community and the big bang of individuality; in this game of oppositions females give up while males confront.

Young men and women, coming from hip-hop or contemporary dance, offer themselves to each other without losing their personalities. A plural and passionate dance, each with it's own approach that is realized without inhibitions. Rich gesture, free, fluid, refined. Sensual duets create a whole that takes your breath away.

Allegoria Stanza develops as a poetic sinusoid, a wave that loses and renews the strength. From the unforced emotional passages through the contemplative states where the harmony of human being and nature is created, to the scenes of controlled hysteria. Abou Lagraa entertains passes that fulfil the body and give spatiality.

Behind the movement of the body as scenery, there is a row of images, shiny and attractive. The video decoration of Charles Picq offers a strangled relation between the sea and the heavens. Sea and heavens: a sleepy sense. The storm is brewing, the rain gathers sea and heavens. Gradually calming. The body appears, achieves its fulfilment, the far parts are becoming clear. The body in the mirror of nature returns man to himself. And then the rage of man, symbolically looking into the vast power of elements. Loss of contemplation: an opening of the spirit.

Link: Compagnie La Baraka/Abou Lagraa