The journey to Sutra with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

April 2025, interview, text: Mark Monahan

In 2007, Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui left to China. In an attempt to break out of his comfort zone, he temporarily locked himself up with a group Shoalin monks. The result is the breathtaking performance Sutra, which can be seen in Amare from Wed 28 to Fri 30 May. 

“I was a bit stuck in a comfort zone of working with and being around dancers,” says Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. “And I felt like I wanted to break out of the usual things I was doing. I was talking about this to my friend, the producer Hisashi Itoh, and he asked me, What are you really interested in? I mentioned all the things in my head that were important to me – including martial arts and yoga – and he said, Well, why don’t you go to the Shaolin Temple? You could meet the monks and talk to them.”

Even setting aside Cherkaoui’s specific passions, it is small wonder that Itoh’s suggestion proved so irresistible. Cherkaoui was born in Belgium to a Flemish mother and a Moroccan father, and is a teetotal vegan. He has always considered himself an outsider and this sense of apartness has helped propel him on a lifelong quest to explore foreign cultures in order to find out what links us all. In conversation and his works he displays an intoxicating optimism about the potential for superficially diverse cultures to find common ground.

Only with a mind as thirsty and as fertile as Cherkaoui’s could dissatisfaction with the dance world yield one of the most extraordinary dance shows so far this millennium. Sutra (“Thread”), which eventually grew from that exchange with Itoh, was a critical and popular triumph from the out. Its premiere in May 2008 had critics tripping over themselves to find superlatives, and since that first, sell-out run it has toured to 83 cities in 33 countries playing to over 250,000 people – not bad for a dance show with a 20-strong cast that includes just one dancer.

Cherkaoui’s trip to the Temple proved revelatory. “I had an image in my head of what the monks’ lives would be like,” he says, “but when I was there, it gained so much more depth, when I understood the emotional journey that it must be to want to be a monk. Because everybody had their own journey to be there, and I had mine – I was there because of the things that I was dealing with.”

Cherkaoui’s connection with the monks didn't end there. “I went and met Master Shi Yanda and I felt I’d finally met someone who I could ask the questions that mattered. Like, why are they preaching such peacefulness and yet are fighting like madmen? He told me how meditation is to quieten the mind and how kung fu is to quieten the body. It’s all about interconnectedness with animals, and the way they admire various animals for the way they move. I related to that because when I choreograph I feel increasingly inclined to want to think more like an animal and less like a human being.”

Antony Gormley's Wooden Boxes

But who to design the show that was beginning to germinate in Cherkaoui’s mind? He had been friends with Antony Gormley ever since collaborating on 2005’s Zero Degrees, and was well aware that the celebrated British sculptor had previously travelled extensively in Asia to study Buddhism. “I called him right away,” says Cherkaoui, “and I said, you have to come over here – there’s something about what you are about that I see here. We had been talking about wanting to do another project together, and I just felt: this is the one."

Gormley needed no further persuasion. “I’m very, very interested in China,” he says, “because I think China, whether we like it or not, is the future. I think – in Buddhism and perhaps even more so in Daoism – it’s got very important things to tell us about the reconciliation of mind and matter.”

Gormley’s entire career has stemmed from his fascination with the human body, and his crucial contribution to Sutra reflects this. “In my very limited and amateur role as a designer for dance,” he says, with characteristic modesty, “I am interested not in manipulating light to tell you what kind of emotion you’re supposed to be having, or illustrating narrative, or making scenes in order for you to know where you are. I’m interested in giving the bodies of the dancers’ extensions that can be themselves continually manipulated into new configurations.” And so, Antony came up with the idea of these boxes. "I could feel that we were on to something really big.”

"I wanted to deal with space and in a sense with architecture, and this was a minimal piece of architecture that could be used as a large brick to make larger architectures. But the proportions of the box are really important – 60cm x 60cm x 180cm. You could say this is a human mean."

Szymon Brzóska's score

For the score, Cherkaoui turned to a composer who was just getting started. Born in Poland, Szymon Brzóska was 27 at the time, and had only just finished studying composition in Antwerp. “That year, I saw Larbi’s piece Myth in Antwerp,” he recalls. “I loved it very very much, and saw it three times in a row actually. I approached Larbi at a certain point after one show, gave him my CD, and then a few weeks later he proposed that I work on Sutra!”

Having written some musical “sketches” for Cherkaoui, Brzóska settled on a melancholic score for violin, viola, cello, piano and percussion that in many ways would contrast with the bracing physicality of the monks’ movements.

“I never intended to write music that would be inspired by Chinese music in a clichéd kind of way,” he says, “but I did want a certain flavour of Chinese music. There was some direct inspiration – we used some percussion instruments from China, from the temple – but it was more about a kind of atmosphere. The strings helped me create that as well as the harmony that I wanted. I used piano because I’m a pianist myself, and because I thought it could come in between. It brings harmony, but at the same time it can bring rhythm, even a percussive element.”

From rehearsal space to stage success

In early 2008, clutching an early recording of Brzóska’s score, Cherkaoui returned to the temple to make the piece, and suddenly found himself in a makeshift rehearsal room with the monks.

“That very first time, it was all about movement,” he says. “Martial arts and Shaolin kung fu have movements, so I was just asking, what are the moves you have, and what’s the vocabulary? From what they showed me, there were some things that I felt were really interesting, and others that I didn’t know how to approach. I loved their animal incarnations, when they’re being like a panther or moving like a snake. It’s real theatre – and it’s like dance. When you’re doing Swan Lake, you have to believe you’re a swan. And so, when you have a martial artist who believes he’s an eagle, it’s the same imagination.”

As Cherkaoui talks about the production that evolved from these early workshops, a word that comes up time and again is “journey.” Sutra indeed feels like a journey: his journey – led by a young neophyte – into the mind of a monk; his bid to understand the monks’ existence, to see what they’ve expunged from their lives, to square their physical prowess with their spiritual stillness.

"The moment I chose to be in it as a performer was in the last two or three weeks before the premiere. I was creating all these collective things with the monks, and I felt like I need someone to go against the stream. There are little moments when it’s clear that there is a leader within it, and that leadership shifts from one monk to another. But still, I felt like the bigger narrative was still going to be my own perception, and that this character could give perspective, a certain identification. That’s why a lot of people liked it, because they could feel themselves going along with that character.”

“A lot of people,” while true, is an understatement – 243 performances (and counting) over ten years is an extraordinary achievement for such an experimental show. It raises the question whether Cherkaoui now sees this sort of cross-cultural venture as more valuable than ever in what, many would argue, is a time of great insularity in the west. “I totally think it’s important to keep reaching over to the other shore” he says. “To understand that there is someone there that is like you, and that can inspire you. I had to go all the way to China to find myself again. I was very stuck, and didn’t like who I was seeing when I looked in the mirror. Going to the temple, I learnt to care about myself more, to realise: oh, I’m ok. And it’s the monks who gave me that strength, by welcoming me, and by asking me questions that were on the one hand so naïve, and on the other hand essential. They were simply like, ‘What’s a choreographer?’, and I thought, That’s the best question I’ve ever been asked!"

“I wish this upon everyone,” he concludes, “to have this feeling of a fresh start.”

This text was written by Mark Monahan and was adapted to Amare's editorial guidelines.

Sutra in Amare

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