Ch'ttahh

In Ch’ttahh, Bilal El Had returns to the dance form of his youth: Moroccan Chaabi, the popular dance and folk music inextricably linked to weddings, living room parties, and street celebrations. Between homage and innovation, humour and indictment, El Had channels the explosiveness of the present to cast a loving gaze upon centuries-old dance performances about masculinity and gender expression. In Ch’ttahh, Bilal El Had returns to the dance form of his youth: Moroccan Chaabi, the popular dance and folk music inextricably linked to weddings, living room parties, and street celebrations. The piece intertwines contemporary dance with the centuries-old rhythms, songs, and symbols of Chaabi. Through a play of gestures, El Had explores the long history of men challenging gender conventions in dance, poetry, or music. By exposing the disruption of conventional masculinity inherent in Chaabi, Bilal El Had allows echoes from the archive to collide with contemporary bodies. In doing so, he demonstrates through choreography how social norms are embodied, enforced, and defied. The transformative potential of the dance surfaces, via the expressive intensity of Chaabi, to preserve cultural memory and, simultaneously, to cautiously chart a course for the future. Between tribute and renewal, humour and indictment, Ch’ttahh channels the explosiveness of the present, to cast a loving glance at a collective past. Bilal El Had (b. 1991) is a Moroccan dancer and performer who lives and works in Brussels. After training at P.A.R.T.S., he has collaborated as a performer with (among others) Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Salva Sanchis, Radouan Mriziga, Laurent Chétouane, and Maud Blandel. He is currently developing his own work as a choreographer, focusing on the relationship between music and dance as a space within which traditional forms, cultural memory, and collective consciousness can intersect and transform.