Éléphant

In "Éléphant", Bouchra Ouizguens pursues the artist's exanimation and questioning of the power and physicality of the body in its ritualistic daily presence, its thriving, and its hurt. Éléphant is a fragmented collective body that is traversed by the movements of the performers, singers and musicians who lend their voices and identities. This body that oscillates between strength and fragility, evokes the ephemeral nature of the present. Swinging between brilliance and simplicity, differences and harmony are magnified, revealing the precious and subversive character in the individual and in the collective. In this choreography of voices, Ouizguen, who is one of the main figures of contemporary dance in Morocco, looks into the ancient roots of her home country and develops a dance that fills the present with new life and hope. Biography Based in Marrakech, Bouchra Ouizguen cultivates a personal, unique, and inspired form of choreographic expression, far from the codes of Western contemporary dance. For over a decade, she has been collaborating with women of charismatic presence and powerful, bewitching singing voices, who perform at traditional festivals. As folk artists from southern Morocco, embodying a part of the country's cultural heritage, they carry within them a form of joyful freedom that contrasts with society's gender, cultural, and racial prejudices well beyond Morocco. By inviting them onto the contemporary dance scene, Ouizguen is bringing together past and present, tradition and modernity. Through sharing their respective experiences as women and artists, they form an alliance in order to put the difference to test—but without violence, through gaiety, complicity, and generous attention to human dignity. Website Public artist talk: Bouchra Ouizguen will be a part of the lecture series by the Center for African Studies in Basel on 28.11.2023 from 10.15 a.m. to 12.00 p.m. ​