'Discreet Deaths' Presents Rachid Ouramdane Alone With Theatrical Artifacts
by JENNIFER DUNNING for the New York Times

Born to a poor family of Algerian immigrants in France, Mr. Ouramdane has talked to American interviewers about his sense of dislocation from the cultures to which he has been exposed. Revealingly, he prepared for "Discreet Deaths" by researching youth, death and suicide on the Internet. In the end, the piece's knowingly cool sophistication says more about dislocation than anything in the solo itself.

published: May 13, 2006

Dancing with the dark
[Rachid] Ouramdane’s heart-rending material might lead one to imagine him choreographing a rabidly antiwar work, but this acclaimed experimental artist, now 35, has instead created an exhilarating, subtle, and probing theatrical piece that explores what happens when people must confront their pasts and redefine themselves in relation to war and shifting ideas of nationality. Making his Boston debut, Ouramdane presents this multimedia dance work at the Institute of Contemporary Art tomorrow and Saturday.

What’s left behind - Tap Olé at the Regent, Rachid Ouramdane at the ICA, Prometheus at Boston Conservatory

.... Ouramdane seems to stand at the bottom of a waterfall flooded with images: the details of his father’s torture in the landscape of high-tech wires he commanded across the ICA’s stage floor; fans that swirl like surveillance cameras; video snippets where members of his family share stories that may or may not be reliable and faces are squeezed into fragmentary close-ups that resemble Tony Oursler grotesqueries. He’s the inheritor of intergenerational PTSD.