FringeReview Worldwide 2025
La Femme des Sables
Shakti
Genre: Dance, Dance and Movement Theatre, Experimental, International, Physical Theatre, World Theatre
Venue: The Garage International
Festival: FringeReview Worldwide
Low Down
Japanese-Indian choreographer Shakti explores the themes of isolation, survival, and spiritual awakening through a dance piece inspired by the novel of one of Japan’s most acclaimed existential writers
Review
The 1962 novel “The Woman in the Dunes” by Kobo Abe, one of Japan’s most celebrated surrealist and existentialist writers, inspires this dance performance staged by the Japanese-Indian choreographer and dancer Shakti.
Taking the same title as the book, which in French is “La Femme des Sables,” Shakti freely reinterprets this story from a purely feminine perspective, giving it what at times seems a very intimate reading.
In the original novel the protagonist of the story is a man named Niki Jumpei. He is an amateur entomologist who during an excursion to a seaside village remains trapped at the bottom of a sand pit. This inaccessible place is inhabited by a woman endlessly shoveling sand in order to protect her village from the shifting dunes.
In the dance piece created by Shakti the focus is on this woman, who in the original novel is a widow. Like in the novel the themes of isolation, survival, love, and death are explored in a series of sequences where Shakti couples with Japanese dancer Fumiko Inamori to recreate at first the entrapment of the sand pit.
A choreography using a fishnet and elastic strings symbolizes the feeling of isolation and at the same time of connection between the 2 dancers, moving inside the sand pit whose borders are delimited by 50 meters of Japanese white paper known as washi—a traditional paper made by hand from the inner bark of the mulberry tree.
As the Greek king Sisyphus condemned by the gods to eternally roll a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down each time he neared the top, the Woman of the Dunes sees no end to her toiling of shoveling sand. Yet, within herself, the pain of her task triggers a spiritual development taking her to a higher level of consciousness and feminine awareness. As the mental chains of earth and sand are broken the Woman of the Dunes is free to experiment with desire, liberation and finally death, getting rid of all material bonds in a final piece of ecstatic dance where Shakti performs in full nudity.
There is in this surrealistic, and at times experimental dance piece a loose connection to be found with Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, where the Irish writer, incarcerated because of his homosexuality, finds in the painful prison life and isolation of his cell the essence of spirituality and inner freedom.
“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank-bed, the loathsome food…each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience.” (De Profundis)
Seen from this perspective, the Woman in the Dunes touches a universal theme of spiritual growth, nourished in the most painful moments of our earthly existence.
