Bouchra Ouizguen Eléphant

Following on from OTTOF (2015), Corbeaux (2016) and Jerada (2018), the Moroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen returns to the Festival d’Automne with Éléphant. Accompanied by her faithful group of collaborators, she continues to develop links between popular Moroccan art and contemporary influences.

In Éléphant, Bouchra Ouizguen brings together female performers, singers and musicians from popular tradition in the south of the country with female collaborators alongside whom she has worked on numerous productions in the past. Dance has always been an integral part of their lives, family, and past. Together, they invent a choreographic language in which the unique nature of each of their different paths in life meets a common horizon. The voices, chants and music performed live onstage give rise to the musical score of this ancient chorus-like group. Through their gestures, the performers invoke the beauty of all that fades away, or disappears: how can loss be synonymous with joy? Can the disappearance of things around us be used to stop time and free us from its yoke? The choreographer, Bouchra Ouizguen, is able to seize upon these questions thanks to the emotion present in the movement and sound. Without setting any particular meaning in stone, the stage becomes a place where an encounter between different practices, temporalities, and stories can take place. From out of it, is born a choreographic and sound-based work that is suspended in collective time.