Moroccan choreographer Radouan Mriziga presents the second part in his trilogy centred around the knowledge of the Imazighen people of North Africa. Inspired by the ancient Carthegean moon goddess Tanit, “Ayur” is a solo created for Tunisian choreographer and performer Sondos Belhassen. A female guardian of long­lost wisdom, she passes in and out of a porous dome, speaking words by poet Lilia Ben Romdhane and rapper Mahdi Chammen. In a silver­shaded interweaving of dance, text and architecture, she summons the past while searching for a more inclusive future.

Radouan Mriziga is a Brussels-based choreographer and dancer from Marrakech. After studying dance in Morocco, Tunisia and France, Mriziga graduated from P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Fairly quickly, he began to focus on his work as a maker, creating his first solo “55” in 2014, followed by the performances “3600” (2016), “7” (2017) and “0” (2019), with which he addresses dance through the prism of architecture. Since 2019, Mriziga has been developing a new trilogy of works inspired by the culture and history of the Amazigh, the original inhabitants of North Africa. He tours his choreographies worldwide and is currently an artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels (2017 – 2021) and at deSingel in Antwerp (2021 – 2025).

“We invite you to perceive this work as a choreographic object based on poems and raps as scores. Words and expressions are here tools of symbolic, rhythmical and compositional meaning, and are not intended to explain the movements or to suggest a linear narrative. The poems and the raps hold their own meanings and nuances in the Tunisian language, and through this choreography, your gaze, the translations and the rhythms we look forward to collectively building new narratives for each person individually.”
Radouan Mriziga

Radouan Mriziga: […] With my work I seek to not only focus on the story of North Africa but also to question something universal: how certain groups of indigenous people and a specific kind of knowledge is denied or pushed away. It’s a global problem, and it’s a question of knowledge in general. Here, in my trilogy, I take the Amazigh perspective as a way of looking at how these indigenous people survived throughout history. They kept their identity and they hold their knowledge in non-traditional mediums. It’s not like academic knowledge; they are not writing about their history. Rather, they keep their stories in their bodies, in their art, in their crafts and performances, and in their storytelling. For me it’s more about taking them as an example of survival rather than an example of victimhood.

Gurur Ertem: […] It gives hope about how nonmaterial knowledge, like movements and gestures, can survive and how they reappear and resurface over time. […] The Mediterranean basin is so complex, and there has always been crosscultural mingling and appropriation. People are still taught about cultures as though they have evolved as separate, self-contained, bounded entities. In mainstream discourses on culture and even in arts programmes we see a lot of flattening and homogenising of entire heterogeneous regions. But people have always moved and migrated and intermingled, and cultures coexisted even in prehistoric times.

Find the full conversation between Gurur Ertem and Radouan Mriziga “Undoing Hierarchies of Knowledge” in the Magazine im August and at www.tanzimaugust.de/magazin

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1549