February 6th – 7th, 2025 Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER, Ghent March 7th, 2025 Festspielhaus St. Pölten, St. Pölten April 24th – 25th, 2025 Lieu Unique, Nantes May 9th – 10th, 2025 Sadler’s Wells, London May 14th – 17th, 2025 Dublin Dance Festival, Dublin June 24th – 27th, 2025 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris 120 minutes
Part fiction, part biographical, all elements are overlapping, and it will become difficult to determine what’s myth and what’s reality.
It goes back to a time when families worked in the abattoirs of Belfast. Pigs in the garden of New lodge.
There’s something in the meat of me, bloodline, there is a pink fleshy vulnerability to me, to dancing, there is a violence in me.
This new show will follow the story of Oona’s Great Great Grandfather Specky Clark and his arrival in Belfast.
For this piece which will be unfolding in a series of theatrical images, Oona Doherty will collaborate with many faithful and new partners. The production features music from Irish band Lankum, Gavino Murgia and David Holmes & Raven Violet. Maxime Jerry Fraisse is sound designer, Irish playwright Enda Walsh is dramaturg, Sabine Dargent is set designer, Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust is costume designer and long-time collaborator John Gunning is lighting designer. The piece will be performed by an international cast of 9 dancers.
December 4th – 7th, 2024 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris December 10th, 2024 Espace des Arts, Chalon-sur-Saône December 14th, 2024 Festpielhaus, St. Pölten December 17th – 18th, 2024 Théatre Senart Scéne Nationale, Melun 90 minutes
Bringing together the virtuoso, Irish traditional concertina player Cormac Begley, the European classical, contemporary collective, s t a r g a z e and twelve international dancers from the Teaċ Daṁsa company, MÁM is a meeting place between soloist and ensemble, classical and traditional, the local and universal.
Following the success of his acclaimed re-imagining of the world-famous ballet, Swan Lake/Loch na hEala (2016) Michael Keegan-Dolan and Teaċ Daṁsa have created another mythic yet timely production that acknowledges how life’s polarities can on occasion come together and find resolution.
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 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.
