FRENCH PREMIERE
Night is the first part of the new trilogy around the theme of love of this young Lebanese choreographer. He talks about complexity of passion and all the different possible forms of love. The work of Ali Chahrour is based on stories, legends and lyrical poetry of Arabic cultural heritage and explores our attitude towards this feeling and different ways of expressing it in our modern society. How can the body and its movements transcribe lyricism of Arabic poetry? On stage with two musicians, a singer and a dancer, Ali wonders about the sense of this feeling nowadays and about the violence it can often take shape.
ALI CHAHROUR (Lebanon)
At the Institut national des Beaux-Arts in Beirut, in which Ali Chahrour enrolled in 2008, “dramatic dance,” the only choreographic training available at the university level in Lebanon, is taught as a second-year class as part of the dramatic arts curriculum. In that class, he caught the eye of his professor, Omar Rajeh, who hired him in his company. As a student, Ali Chahrour participated in numerous internships and workshops, in order to diversify his approach to movement. During that time, the young dancer learned to “struggle to create,” and sketched his first show, On the Lips Snow, a duo about the end of love, which he presented in Beirut and in the Netherlands in 2011, shortly after graduating. The following year, he created Danas, which “studies the everyday violence to which the body is subjected,” the beginning of an aesthetics he then began to build on, “without compromising,” in the social, political, and religious context that is his: a rejection of the formatted bodies of western contemporary dance in order to showcase a corpus “that has forgotten the great stories of the Arab world.” His latest creations, Fatmeh and Leila’s Death, question Shiite rituals and their contemporary transformations.
