As part of Saison Méditerranée 2026, we present a double bill introducing two Lebanese choreographers, Nivine Kallas and Khouloud Yassine, whose work is as powerful as it is compelling.
Nivine Kallas explores the resonances and tensions between gesture and speech, developing a choreographic language of remarkable formal quality, with variations that are both delicate and powerful. Her dance enters into dialogue with the Arabic language—its written form and rhythm, its inflections and silences. In SāHO, she focuses more specifically on how, in Lebanon, this language reflects an education system more committed to the rigidity of tradition than to passing on the fragments of a collective memory. Recalling the classroom, gazing out of the window and dreaming of escape, Nivine Kallas initially seems disconnected from herself, as though withdrawn into an inner exile. But her defiance is silent, and gradually her body begins to resist. Guided by intuition, she unfolds a fragmented vocabulary of movement, poised between repression and elevation, fragility and determination. By reclaiming an Arabic language she was never able to inhabit freely, she transforms constraint into a force for emancipation; her dance then draws its intensity from a profound attentiveness to the world around her.
Source: paris.fr — photo: © Vanessa Daou