Bouchra Ouizguen
OTTOF
septembersept 16 – 20
© © Margot Valeur ©
© © Margot Valeur ©
© © Margot Valeur ©
© © Bouchra Ouizguen ©
Artistic Direction, Bouchra Ouizguen
Singers, dancers, Kabboura Aït Hmad, El Hanna Fatéma, Halima Sahmoud,
Fatna Ibn El Khatyb, Bouchra Ouizguen
Lighting, Eric Wurtz
Music, Lutosławski - Preludes and Fugue for 13 solo Strings, Nina Simone - My Baby Just Cares For Me
A Compagnie O production
In coproduction with Festival Montpellier Danse ; Festival d’Automne à Paris ; Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou ; Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Belgium) ; La Bâtie – Festival de Genève ; Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle de l’Ambassade de France au Maroc
In partnership with Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou ; Festival d’Automne à Paris
With support from l’Institut Français de Marrakech // With support from Arcadi
This show is part of the Parcours d’auteurs cultural and artistic education programme, a joint initiative between the Festival d’Automne and the SACD
First performed on 25 June 2015 at the Festival Montpellier Danse
Each different, but all in unison, Bouchra Ouizgen’s ladies steadfastly furrow their paths. They carve out a space at the crossover between tradition and the everyday, condensing or elongating it to the sound of their songs, laughter and whispers. As artists accustomed to performing for distracted, sometimes entranced audiences at weddings and cabarets, they know how to make their rhythm felt, and mark out their terrain. Bouchra Ouizgen’s disturbing witches, or hard-working ants, as the case may be, carry out artistic research which is radically anchored in the present. Kabboura Aït Ben Hmad, El Hanna Fatéma, Halima Sahmoud and Fatna Ibn El Khatyb form the core members of compagnie O, the first three of whom we saw in Madame Plaza, and then in Ha !.
In the latter work, dressed in white headscarves, the dark background bringing out the sharp lines of their throats and heads, they embarked upon a choreography of sighs, necklines, shrieks, and head shaking. In Les Corbeaux, seventeen women of all ages gave themselves over to the experience of this primordial trance, shaking the branches of a tree with its roots deep in the ground. This journey, between underground and surface, is akin to the one carried out by ants (or ottof in the Berber language).
In her latest creation, Bouchra Ouizgen entreats her four accomplices to dig channels, and to drain and renew the ground that they have been treading together for eight years now. In doing so, they prolong and deepen this unique, radical, human and artistic adventure.
In the same place