Hanane Hajj Ali, "جوغينغ (Jogging)", press conference of the 16 July 2022

When the audience enters, Hanane Hajj Ali is already onstage. Dressed all in black, she stretches, warms up, gets her voice ready for a one-woman show… and starts running. A hilarious and sometimes very dark performance, this iconoclast Jogging follows the stories of four women: Hanane herself, but also Medea, in both an ancient and contemporary versions, either killing her own children or sacrificing them to the altar of the wars that plague the Middle East. It’s just a question of point of view. A work inspired by the life of the director herself as “woman, mother, actress, citizen,” as she runs every day through the alleys of Beirut to ward of stress, depression, and osteoporosis… A health exercise she transforms into a dive into the depths of her most intimate dreams and fears. A radical challenge to the stereotypes and prejudices that afflict the women of the Arab world.