the tangible

There is visual material by Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Yazan Khalili, two artists from Ramallah.
There is music by Sublime Frequencies, György Ligeti...
There are texts by John Berger, Etel Adnan, Mourid Barghouti, Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim.
There are three dancers: Tale Dolven from Stavanger, Liz Kinoshita from Toronto and Federica Porello from Genoa.
There are four actors: Eve-Chems de Brouwer from Paris, Boutaïna Elfekkak from Paris, Mokhallad Rasem from Rabat and Frank Vercruyssen from Antwerp. **

This performance is perhaps a declaration of love to the wounded, downtrodden and abused cradle of civilization, which invariably rises again from the ashes, a reflection that goes beyond opinions, an abstract and personal testimony about people rather than about parties, about loss and injustice and their antonyms rather than about points of view.
Or perhaps it is simply a balancing act, a search for a way to speak about the Middle East without resorting to a simplistic, patronizing or neo-orientalistic attitude.

* The ‘Fertile Crescent’ or ‘Al Hilal Al Khaseeb’ is a waxing moon-shaped area, also called 'The cradle of civilization', which once encompassed the Orient, Old Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. Today the area roughly corresponds to modern Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and parts of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, south-eastern Turkey and south-western Iran.

** The performance was created in April 2010 with Eid Aziz from Nablus and Rojina Rahmoon from Damascus, both students at the theatre school in Damascus. Due to insurmountable problems with the school direction we had to replace these two actors for the tour in November and December 2010.

The next day I accompanied him to the ruin.  There were several epicentres where everything had been reduced to dust, surrounded by tiny fragments.  Except for pipes and wires no recognisable objects remained.  Everything which had been assembled during a lifetime had gone without trace, had lost its name.  An amnesia not of the mind but of the tangible.
(a quote from the book From A to X by John Berger)

music by Aswatt, Munir Bachir, Béla Bartók, Brahim El Belkani, Céline Bernard, The Bug, The Bug, Johnny Cash, Tom Chant, John Coltrane, Thierry De Mey, Said Fafy, Morton Feldman, Jimmy Garrison, Franz Hautzinger, Mahjoub Jaffer, Elvin Jones, Mazen Kerbaj, Abbes Larfaoui, György Ligeti, Said Oughassal, Max Roach, Scuba, Nasseer Shamma, Sublime Frequencies, Christine Sehnaoui, Sharif Sehnaoui, Cassandra Wilson, Raed Yassin

thanks to Abbas Beydoun, Tony Chakar, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, An D’Huys, Oussama Ghanam, Ramzy Haidar, Tarek Halaby, Cynthia Loemij, Lisa Risum Olsen, Chrysa Parkinson, Sara Sehnaoui, Hans J. Skogen, Christine Tohme, Sam Van Overschelde, Fabienne Verstraeten, the Belgian Embassy in Damascus