Iskanderia leh ?

Piece for 5 dancers | interior spaces/theatre stage or singular spaces (hangar, wasteland, museum…) | 60 minutes

The reading room we are in is a very strange one. Desks, books, chairs, everything is there. But we will not read in the hushed silence of research. We will speak often and sometimes loudly; and the body will show itself in all its power, out of language, and dancing with the words. We shall even see images from the past emerge. We must begin by answering this first question, Why Alexandria? (a tribute to a city that has become the city of our dance over the years), and then answer all the others that it has brought up, shaking up our relationship to the otherness as well as to this language of freedom that is contemporary dance, which is both foreign and common.

Artistic direction Anne Le Batard, Jean-Antoine Bigot

Dance Corinne Pontana, J.-A. Bigot, Mohammed Fouad/Emma Riba, Rolando Rocha, Ji-in Gook

Associate artist Martine Derain

Artistic collaboration Emilie Petit

Scenography Jean-Antoine Bigot

Lighting design Jean-Philippe Pellieux

Video manager Camille Sanchez

Production Ex Nihilo, created in 2019

Coproduction and residency Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée | KLAP Maison pour la danse à Marseille | Die Theater Chemnitz | L’Usine-Centre national des arts de la rue et de l’espace public-Tournefeuille / Toulouse Métropole | Le Cirque Jules Verne-Pôle National Cirque et Arts de la Rue d’Amiens

Coproduction L’Officina Dansem; Coopérative De Rue et De Cirque (2r2c)

Partners Nassim el Raqs / La Cité des arts de la rue in Marseille

Special thanks to Julie Lucazeau, Générik Vapeur

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Note on research: in 2017, the company was invited by the Mucem to question its collections dating from the colonial period. One theme: Fictional representations through the archives, and two forms to be created: a performance and an installation. There were very few images in the museum’s collection at that time: Ex Nihilo proposed to question their relationship with the formerly colonised countries through their own archives, a corpus constituted during the multiple performances and workshops given in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco…

The Ex Nihilo team, in which each of the dancers – Peruvian, Korean, Egyptian, and French – is crossed by a plural history, carries a common history, that of a friendship that has linked dancers and choreographers for many years, who, in turn, are regular guests of each other in their own countries. The polyphony of languages and words responds here to the tension of bodies, caught somewhere in between the joy of the encounter, the desire to understand each other, and the eternal misunderstanding. Thus, Iskanderia leh? is not a point of view on the “other”, on the foreigner. It is a point of view on the fundamental heterogeneity of being, a poetic relationship with Otherness, wrote the poet Antonio Machado, through dance, words, and images

Some dates

Musée des Civilisations d’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Mucem, Marseille); Klap – Maison pour la danse, Marseille; Festival La Rue est à Amiens.

Archives, video, sound, images…

Ex Nihilo has teamed up with Martine Derain, artist, and editor, whose visual work is nourished by a relationship with institutional archives and their counter-fields: images produced in the family, militant, or artistic context, rarely preserved, popular and precious collections that she is committed to finding.

In the collection of these archives – counter-fields to the usual museum discourse – the company also collaborated with Émilie Petit, a painter and founder of the Nassim el Raqs in situ creation festival in Alexandria, for the experience of creating and sharing that she has been conducting for many years.

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Iskanderia leh ?

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April 2025

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May 2025

Training + Munz Floor®

In-Paradise

Training Ex Nihilo

Iskanderia leh ?

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