Ihsane

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was a teenager when his father died. Thirty years later, now a world-renowned choreographer, he searched in vain for his father’s grave in an overcrowded cemetery in Tangier. Today he continues to search for him in this very personal creation, developed in collaboration with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève and Eastman. In Arabic, the word ‘Ihsan’ represents an ideal of goodness, kindness and benevolence. In Belgium, however, the word is also associated with a racist and homophobic crime that took place in Liège in 2012: Ihsane, a young homosexual man of Moroccan origin, was beaten to death outside a nightclub. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui identifies with him and honours him through this production, a stage on the quest for inner peace, an attempt to transcend conflict, abandonment and forgetting. Together with an artistic team that reflects the effervescence and vitality of this region of the world to which he is linked through his ancestors, the choreographer reveals the invisible threads that bind us, despite the contemporary discourse on identity.