La Dispute

When Mohammed El Khatib was commissioned to make a theatre production for children, he soon encountered a series of obstacles. He therefore decided to work not for children, but with them. He spent months in various primary schools, met more than one hundred 8-year-olds of various social backgrounds, and listened to what they had to say.

What he realized was that many of these children’s parents were no longer together, and that this divorce occupied a central place in their lives. The subject has been researched extensively, but you rarely get to hear what the children themselves think about it. That is why El Khatib asks the following in La Dispute: What question would you like to ask your parents today?

Children constitute an invisible social class that we expect to conform to our rules without having to teach us anything. Listening to their questions means taking them seriously. But especially also facing up to the fact that adults usually just do – and know very little.

• Theatre maker Mohamed El Khatib often brings the everyday onto the stage in his work. Whether it is fifty-three fans of a football club (Stadion) or a group of museum attendants (Gardien Party). He gives a voice to those we do not often hear and brings those in the margins into the spotlight. His leitmotif is social class and our relationship with art: what do we think are legitimate subjects? Who is permitted to speak? And who is in the theatre?

A clever piece of "docufiction" about an underexplored subject. - DE STANDAARD