SāHO - Nivine Kallas

As part of the Mediterranean Season 2026, we present a double bill to introduce you to two Lebanese choreographers, Nivine Kallas and Khouloud Yassine, both powerful and captivating.

Nivine Kallas explores the resonances and points of tension between gesture and speech, developing a choreographic language of singular formal quality, with variations that are both delicate and powerful.

Her dance dialogues with the Arabic language, its script and rhythm, its inflections and silences.

In SāHO, she particularly questions how this language reflects, in Lebanon, an educational system more attached to the rigidity of tradition than to the transmission of a shattered collective memory.

Recalling the classroom, looking out the window and dreaming of escape, Nivine Kallas at first seems absent to herself, as if withdrawn into an inner exile. But her dissent is silent, and little by little her body enters into resistance.

Guided by intuition, she deploys fragmented gestures, stretched between repression and elevation, fragility and determination.

By reappropriating an Arabic language she was never able to inhabit freely, she transforms constraint into a power of emancipation; her dance then draws its intensity from a deep listening to the world around her.