Audience Warm-Up

Since 2012, he has therefore situated all his creative work within the Lebanese sociopolitical and religious context. He draws particular inspiration from the Shiite funeral rites practiced by his family, since these allow total expression of the body.

Chahrour combines dance and music in his work and creates a unique aesthetic of the dancing body by working with non-professionals, chosen for the authenticity of their being, their way of moving, and the stories they carry. His aunt, who has appeared in several of his works, including Leila se meurt (MAI, 2016), dances with her son Abbas in Told by my mother. This is the second part of a trilogy about love created in the context of a major economic crisis and the pandemic, following the explosion in the Port of Beirut. It turns dancing into a powerful act of resistance and freedom.

May He Rise and Smell the Fragrance (FTA, 2019) closed the cycle about death created by Chahrour. In Chahrour’s new trilogy in progress, he explores fear as a tool of political control and its impact on the body.

Of dual Bundjalung, Indigenous Australian, and Ngāpuhi, Aotearoa/New Zealander descent, Amrita Hepi is a rising star in the international contemporary dance scene. Over the past few years, she has been in widespread demand thanks to her talent, rigour, and remarkable ability to make complex choreographic and performative ideas recognisable.

Her interest as an artist is in the idea of archive particularly in relation to the body and how it is organized by people/event. By coalescing fact and fiction, memoir and ethnography, the local and the singular into the performance/art work she makes. Amrita trained at NAISDA Dance College and Ailey Dance School. A critically acclaimed artist she has twice been the winner of the people’s choice award from the Keir Choreographic Award, was part of the Forbes 30 under 30 for artists, and has shown and been commissioned nationally and internationally.

In Australia, she has been invited to collaborate with the country’s most prestigious dance companies and leading venues, including Marrugeku, ACCA – Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Southbank), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Sydney). Elsewhere in the world, her work has been presented at South East Dance (Brighton), Art Central (Hong Kong), The Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Fusebox Festival (Austin), and others.

Hepi approaches dance as social function and method of resistance. She views it as a state of being, a concrete action that opens up possibilities of community and transmission, and a vital joyous space. Her work intertwines disciplines and media, drawing on installation, performance, video, sculpture, literature, new technologies, and more.

She has a long history of collaborating with other artists as director and dramaturge. Recently, Mish performed in The First Bad Man, A Book Club Based on the Novel by Miranda July at the Lincoln Center for the Under The Radar Festival (2024). Mish’s work has been presented or commissioned by a wide range of institutions including the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Festival, Art Gallery of South Australia Adelaide Biennale, PICA, Hong Kong Rep Theatre/West Kowloon Cultural District, Noorderzon Festival, Battersea Arts Centre, Forest Fringe, Taipei Performing Arts Centre and La Mama, among others. Using humour, facts and fiction, she is intent on examining, wasting and/or cherishing time spent with other people under the banner of “art”.