We collaborate to go somewhere

You conceive of your work in trilogies and series that research the different types of knowledge production of Amazigh people: storytelling, music and art. How does Atlas / The Mountain function here?

The Numbers Trilogy (55, 3600, 7) and the 0.- and 8.-series deal with the relationship of body to space through Maghreb architecture. The Goddess Trilogy (Tafukt, Ayur, Akal) and Libya further this line of research through a focus on North-African narratives in relation to different places of the mediterranean through time. How can history be worked around and how have Amazigh people survived with their history not through archiving, but in bodies and craft, rituals, music, fashion. The new trilogy considers the ways of inhabiting spaces, once again connected to the Maghreb: the mountain, the desert and the sea. It continues my work by dealing with the knowledge of the landscape as a continuity of ancestral knowledge.

After 55, Atlas is only your second solo that you dance yourself. Working generally with other performers on stage, how is this process different (if at all)?

This new solo comes exactly ten years after 55 and follows the continuity I developed from different paths and ways of researching. The cycle closed with Libya and Atlas now opens a new one. I was practicing choreographic knowledge from outside - because making choreography is not a gift, but a practice that needs nourishing - which took me ten years. Being continuously in and out of your own choreographies quickly becomes very complex, so I chose to stay out to practice. Now, going back to the solo form, I return to my own body and movement. I retreat again in my own intimate relation with the stage and the performance as choreographer and performer.

In many of your works, there has been some kind of animal presence. You often play a recording of birds singing for example. In Atlas we see this take a more central space. Where did this come from?

In my work there are recurring elements. The relation to space in the form of architecture, but also as a collective chosen or not chosen place. Geometry and rhythm hold my creations from the start and have been important in my writing and in dramaturgy. And then there is the presence of other beings. People, but animals as well, such as birds and cats that find the best spaces to dwell in the air and on earth. After the work on the mediterranean, landscapes and animals stayed with me emotionally. I wanted to take this as a starting point, the mountain, desert and sea each connected to different animals. A relationship to these fur humans difficultly inhabitable spaces through animals that do so easier. With the mountain, the figure of the barbary sheep kept coming back as an almost spiritual guardian and thus became - inspired by Oudaden, an Amazigh music band - a way to look to the world through the gaze of the animal, at the human destruction of the planet through the eyes of another.

You called the Goddess Trilogy ‘exercises in the Black Box’ after your more explicit site-specific work in. What you have learned from them and how do they continue in this new chapter?

I said that, but somehow never ended up in the black box, or not using it frontally. I am still learning to relate to it. Something about space keeps me from deciding on a frontal black box performance. I think I have to accept that this is my nature and that the black box comes as an exercise which I love, but can never promise. Somehow the pieces always take over the space, they take over the theatre and don’t accept to exist in one form. I have decided that my work on the desert will be in the black box, but Atlas, because of its site specific creation in Tunis, gathers the audience at two sides, creating a kind of triangle. So I guess I haven’t learned anything (laughs).

In my sense, your work deals with questions of inhabiting and sharing space on different scales. How do you see this thematic shift from architecture, to epistemologies and to landscapes?

The trilogy of architecture was about my body in relation to space that is constructed and how other people bring a force to it. The Goddess Trilogy talks about people that lived before and the goddesses that inhabited these shared spaces. Now it goes even further: to the power of the landscape itself, to the force of the shaping of communities that inhabit them. Okay there is architecture, there are people, but these spaces have another power that I cannot condense in a made up building. It’s their force itself that makes architecture and, therefore, holds a certain knowledge and resistance to the capitalist power of the city. It demands another way of inhabiting the world.

You rarely reproduce the conditions of the ‘théâtre à l’italienne’ with only one frontal view. You place the audience around the choreography, or invite them on stage as in 7. How do you approach this encounter of audience and choreography? 

The audience is part of the work. There is opacity, but as an agreement that we let it be there and that it is ok. We collaborate to go somewhere. I decide the path, yes, but on the path there is a lot of space for the audience to take their own journey through imagination or literally moving through space. I think that is why most of my work ends up in these site specific situations, because of the audience as an element that is there from the beginning. I am not in this old way of making performance where things are hidden and the audience is tricked, which is also nice! The audience is never other. I try to suggest something to reflect on but it is never the other witnessing something they have to be fascinated or provoked by or feel happy or sad. We are here together, live this experience and don’t look at it.

Interview by Elias D’hollander