TARAB is a participatory piece for 6 dancers, 1 live-act composer and 100 ‘accomplices’.
Choreographer Eric Minh Cuong Castaing invites us to a participatory celebration, under the guidance of artists from the countries of the Levant. He invites musician Rayess Bek and six dancers from the Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian diasporas, invoking the lively rhythms and dances of the Levant. For several hours, amateur dancers will rub shoulders with the professionals on stage, guided by choreographic protocols.
The dabke, a folk dance from the Levant, will take pride of place, in a game of transmission and shared joy.
Shiraz is a choreography for six dancers, weaving together a fabric of movements and gestures. Their insistent energy, moments of convergence and passage through ephemeral constellations are what takes center stage in this performance. A pulsating dance imbued with a sense of enchantment and longing, coiling and uncoiling to the pulsating beat of a capturing music.
The starting point for this piece is the Shiraz Arts Festival. A festival for live arts that took place between 1967 and 1977 in south of Iran and radically rethought the relationship to the audience and modalities of framing art works. Armin Hokmi, together with the team, places it into our present day in the form of a revival, by giving it a new appearance through a dance performance. Shiraz is both a homage and a fictional setting. It seeks to reimagine the ambitions of the festival and its love for the live arts, their autonomy as art forms and their common roots across geographical borders.
Shiraz is created out of a devotion to a notion of dance and choreography that emphasizes their power to ignite joy, bring about experiences of delving into sensuous worlds, and their ability to transform perception and our modes of affective engagement with live performance.
May 6th – 11th, 2025 Grand Théâtre de Genève, Geneva June 5th – 7th, 2025 Kampnagel, Hamburg January 14th – 17th, 2026 Maison de la Danse, Lyon January 24th, 2026 Festspielhaus St. Pölten, St. Pölten June 11th – 14th, 2026 De Singel, Antwerp 65 minutes
With Mirage, Damien Jalet offers his very first creation for the Ballet du Grand Théâtre, where he has been an associate artist since 2022. Mirage also constitutes the fourth chapter of his collaboration with Japanese visual artist Kohei Nawa.
Inspired by the phenomenon of mirages and Fata Morgana – optical illusions linked to specific meteorological conditions, caused by light being distorted as it passes through different- temperature layers of air – Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa depict humanity wandering in a metaphorical desert in search of itself.
Through a series of unpredictable transformations inspired by different mythologies, climatology, botany and entomology, as well as Hayagawari – a Japanese kabuki theatre technique in which performers suddenly transform during a performance –, the piece peels back the performers, layer after layer, exploring an endless variety of physical and emotional states.
Sometimes evoking the spectres of a civilization at the edge of a dry well, sometimes crossed with the dazzling colours and sensuality of tropical nature, Mirage passes through like a moving, fluctuating, waking dream of atmospheric phenomena.
November 13th – 19th, 2024 Grand Théâtre de Genève, Geneva January 18th – 19th, 2025 Staatenhaus, Cologne January 24th, 2025 Festspielhaus St. Pölten, St. Pölten March 30th – April 6th, 2025 Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris October 2nd – 4th, 2025 Danse Danse, Montreal December 12th – 17th, 2025 De Singel, Antwerp Duration: 90 minutes
In Arabic, the word Ihsane represents an ideal of goodness, kindness and benevolence. In Islam, it refers to a form of communion with the universe. With Ihsane, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui continues a diptych begun within his Eastman company with Vlaemsch (chez moi), in 2022. While Vlaemsch was dedicated to his mother and his Flemish roots, Ihsane explores his relationship with his father, who left Morocco for Flanders, emigrating but always retaining – despite leaving – an unconditional love for his home country. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was still a teenager when his father died. Thirty years later, he searched for him in vain in a Tangier cemetery too full of graves. He continues to search for him through this creation bringing together dancers from the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève and Eastman.
But in Belgium, Ihsane is also associated with a racist and homophobic crime that took place in Liège in 2012: a young homosexual man of 32, of Moroccan origin, beaten to death outside a nightclub. As someone who himself identifies as an artist, a queer and an Arab, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui identifies with and pays tribute to him through this production which revisits his family story. Ihsane is a journey towards the quest for inner peace, and the attempt to transcend conflict, abandonment and forgetting. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui dances the questions that obsess him: what do we have left when our place slips away and fades? How can multiple identities coexist in the same body?
As ever, the choreographer has assembled a unique artistic team, reflecting the effervescence and artistic vitality of this region of the world to which Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is linked through his ancestors. Tunisian musician and viola d’amore virtuoso, Jasser Haj Youssef, will compose the music and perform it onstage with Moroccan singer Mohammed el Arabi Serghini and Lebanese singer Fadia Tomb El-Hage. Stage design will be from visual artist Amine Amharech, who creates sensory and sensitive spaces into which Moroccan influences are often melded, while costumes are by fashion designer Amine Bendriouich, who elevates traditional forms of Berber clothing beyond norms and gender.
With Ihsane, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui watches the world change in a never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth. He is wary of cultures when they imprison and separate individuals. He prefers geography in the making, ever-changing landscapes, and the shared space where we coexist. In this space, he reveals the invisible threads that connect us to each other.
September 26th – 28th, 2024 Teatro Argentina, Rome October 2nd – 4th, 2024 Théâtre 71, Malakoff October 11th – 12th, 2024 Théâtre de Liège, Liège October 30th – 31st, 2024 Halles de Schaerbeek, Brussels November 13th – 15th, 2024 Tandem scène nationale, Douai December 2nd – 15th, 2024 ThéâtredelaCité, Toulouse January 10th – 11th, 2025 Le Parvis scène nationale, Tarbes January 24th – February 1st, 2025 MC93, Bobigny February 18th – 22th, 2025, Comédie de Genève, Geneva 2h
An opus even more choreographic than the previous works, Qui som? , under the influence of the Spanish group Mal Pelo, could be considered the heir to Maguy Marin’s May B or Paso Doble by the duo Josef Nadj and Miquel Barceló.
Philippe Noisette
The first part of a triptych in which ceramic is both the material and the gesture of an investigation into our worlds in the making, a journey through our ways of believing and doing together, Qui som? is a wager: that dreaming is an exploratory and transformative power, an imaginary force that overflows each of us to link us to other presences, a way of orienting ourselves in obscure journeys, in secret lands. It’s a struggle. It’s alive. In colour. In clay. In plastic. In scraps and eternity.
“Our inner worlds, our intimate territories, are the breeding ground for the social landscapes to come. So if what’s to come is already here, inside our bodies, if it’s already being made inside us, we’re trying to highlight what keeps the joy, the desire, what resists, sings and dances inside us forever, to give ourselves the courage to see ourselves and not forget the worst.”
