After a one-month residency period, the first showing of Plastic, a performance by the up-and-coming director/choreographer Meher Debbich Awachri from Tunisia was presented at Het Huis Utrecht in December 2014. This work-in-progress was followed by an in-depth talk, where the artists discussed their work process and the audience was asked to give their feedback.
Plastic is physical theater and deals with a new generation of young men in the Middle East and North Africa, who are stuck between expectations and reality and feel the heavy burden from the generations before them. It was performed by dancer/choreographer Hussein Khadour (Syria), dancer Hazem Header (Egypt), actor Mahrez Taher (Tunisia), and the Dutch-based dancer/actor Maciej Beczek, who were selected during an audition held in September 2014.
This first residency period was supported by Hivos and the Lutfia Rabbani Foundation and was organized in collaboration with Het Huis Utrecht and the Henny Jurriëns Stichting. A second residency period followed in 2015, after which the performance premiered during the fifth edition of the Dancing on the Edge Festival in November 2015.
This project is organized by Dancing on the Edge, a non-profit, project-based organization that stimulates artistic exchange with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region). The focus is on contemporary art of high artistic quality, often by a young generation of artists searching for new cosmopolitan Middle-Eastern art forms, working with contemporary themes, and looking for links to socially relevant subjects.
