Trembling Alone Can Hold

Wind doesn't exist on the stage. Wearing a slightly shy smile, he squats down, circles his arms and uses his eyes to say hello. Three directions, three times. As he follows a trajectory, an invisible tribe besides him seems to appear. They dance around fireplaces, greet one another on the way. The long-draped scarf around his neck begins to tremble. 

This is a solo work from Emran Alamareen presented at the second night of three-evening presentations at HAU theatre. This year, the fourth edition of project „Un|Controlled Gestures“ brings seven choreographers from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Tunisia to the audience and offering insights of their new work in progress. By tracing gestures through time and territory, each work brings to the stage what trembling alone can hold.

What the Hands Remember

Dana Amer's solo „Nice to smell you“ offers something more intimate. Two beams of white light converge from opposite sides of the space, narrowing onto her hands. Squeezing, rolling, shifting at the wrist, she navigates her memory in the darkness. Hair becomes a sign of gravity, dragging her body in the space. As a former national gymnast team member from Syria, she commands her body with a precise tempo. Watching her moving through fragments of soundscapes feels like watching discontinuous images in a film, temporally crystallised and sedimented movements. 

Then, a shift. She sits on the floor, gathers her hair, and begins to braid it with her fingers, one strand at a time. The same hands, the same gesture that opened the work. But now they open outward into a full dance, carrying weight as will.

Leave to Live

Sharp sounds of head scraping the floor, the man bending over himself and crawling. The background plays street noise and unceasing sound of horns. For some, instability is daily life. After almost ten minutes tension, Ahmed Ben Abid slowly raises his head, pulls a towel and a stainless-steel bowl from beneath his clothes, sets up a camera. A livestream seems to happen. 

It is Ahmed’s father, the family. Every father has a particular habit of looking into the camera, asks the mother to join the call to chat with their beloved son. In his mother tongue, Ahmed must be asking how to make a perfect dough, his mother answers the exact ratio of water to flour without a second thought. Laughter fills between in their sound of the language. The most ordinary moment in life, happening in real time, somewhere with a constant instability.

Ahmed takes the repetitive kneading movements into the next scene, where he turns the camera outward onto us while narrating his city and the sea. A face recognition system flickers across the screen, tagged with the names of emotion. Under the self-gaze, our bodies enter an unknown state as the theme of the night.

Beyond the Project

After four editions, the „Un|Controlled Gestures“ has been forming a small, scattered community of choreographers, mentors and alumni across borders. With the double bill featuring „Losing It“ by Samaa Wakim and „Just One Tile“ by Islam Elarabi, two alumni of earlier editions came back to HAU. Samaa spoke about how her mind drifts mid-tour, knowing that her neighbours live inside the world her work is made of. This struggle surfaced again, almost in passing, while she was discussing something else entirely. „Every performance, as I perform it again“, she said, „feels like being run over by a truck.“ This particular kind of trembling is what we are invited to learn from within. 

In her opening remarks, project manager Petra Poelzl quoted, „It brings us together in absolute diversity, in a whirlwind of encounters. A utopia that never settles and that opens up tomorrow, like a shared sun and fruit.“