SāHO - Nivine Kallas

Nivine Kallas presents SāHO, a dance performance exploring the resonances and tensions between gesture and speech. Her choreography develops a language of singular formal quality, with variations that are both delicate and powerful. The dance dialogues with the Arabic language, its script, rhythm, inflections, and silences.

In SāHO, Kallas questions how the Arabic language in Lebanon reflects an educational system more attached to the rigidity of tradition than to the transmission of a fragmented collective memory. Reminiscing about the classroom, looking out the window and dreaming of escape, she initially seems absent, withdrawn into an inner exile. But her dissidence is silent, and gradually her body enters into resistance.

Guided by intuition, she deploys a fragmented gesture, stretched between repression and elevation, fragility and determination. By reappropriating an Arabic language she could never inhabit freely, she transforms constraint into a power of emancipation; her dance draws its intensity from a deep listening to the world around her.