Your project Magec / the Desert is part of a trilogy dedicated to the desert, the mountains, and the sea. Why did you choose to draw inspiration from these environments?
I previously worked on the history of North Africa through the lens of the indigenous Amazigh culture, which is part of my heritage. These three places kept coming back: the sea, the mountains, and the desert. They are places of passage, of transformation, spaces where one is confronted with nature in its vastness, but also with the memory of the peoples who have inhabited them for centuries. With Magec / the Desert, I wanted to explore the desert differently. It is often seen as empty, as an absence, a place without culture or life, to the point that France felt comfortable carrying out nuclear tests there up until the 1990s. Yet deserts are reservoirs of knowledge, poetic and political spaces where communities have developed ways of life in symbiosis with their environment. The desert is a land of spirituality and transmission. The Sahara, the Arabian Desert, the steppes of Central Asia, or the deserts of the Americas share this cultural and symbolic richness. They have inspired poetry, music, architecture, and shaped forms of resistance in the face of climate change and imperialism. Through dance, I seek to reveal the hidden depth of the desert, to extract is ancestral wisdom. My goal is not to limit myself to an aesthetic representation, but to understand what these spaces can teach us about our relationship to the world, to time, and to ourselves.
You undertook an immersive experience in the desert with your team of dancers. How did that experience influence the creation of the performance?
Spending time in the desert was a crucial step in this project. We lived there for several days, walking, observing, and experiencing the space in all its uniqueness. It wasn’t just about absorbing the atmosphere, but also about physically feeling the relationship to light, to wind, to the desert’s vastness and unique texture. What struck me was how the desert is constantly moving. Contrary to the idea we might have of a static landscape, it is always transforming: the dunes shift, the light alters our perception of forms, shadows draw new interconnected, hybrid geographies. This fluidity influenced my reflection on time and space in dance. From a choreographic point of view, this experience had a profound impact on how we work with slowness, repetition, withdrawing, and emergence. The body is no longer just moving, but in dialogue with a changing environment. This also led us to explore movements inspired by the way desert inhabitants travel through the land, as well as by references to animals and natural elements of the desert. Because movement is always an emotion, the search for harmony between soul, mind, and body. Paradoxically, dance allows us to embody beings and stories that differ radically from our human experience. It’s a transformation that operates a shift within us, that opens us to other perspectives such as that of a plant or an animal. It’s a way of questioning our connection to nature well beyond the usual binaries. This immersion in the desert also allowed us to collect sounds, images, and texts, which are integrated into our creation as projections and sound compositions. The desert is a space of resonance: sounds carry differently, silences have a particular density. We tried to translate that sensation in the performance, playing with the contrasts between presence and absence, intensity and restraint.
The sundial is one of the central metaphors in your show. Why did you choose this symbol? Were there other sources of inspiration that guided your work?
Visually, the performance is inspired by a fundamental element of the desert: light. The sundial soon emerged as a central symbol. It represents our relationship to time, and the way shadows and light can shape space. This idea is present everywhere in the way we staged the show, from the choreography to the scenography and the way we play with temporality. The title Magec / the Desert reflects this approach: Magec evokes the magic of the desert but is also a reference to Magec, the Amazigh sun deity in the Canary Islands. Sun and shadow are primordial elements of life in these regions, and they are at the heart of this creation. The costumes draw inspiration from indigenous animals and plants, but also from patterns found in rock paintings and from the traditional dances of nomadic peoples. We worked from gestures we observed, a whole grammar of the body influenced by the environment, and which influences it in return. Movement is also filled with resonances, with the writings of Maïa Tellit Hawad, a Franco-Tuareg scholar, and poet and writer Hawad Mahmoudan. Regarding the sound of the show, we use mainly the sound and music of Deena Abdelwahed. We are also using video, with texts projected in multiple languages. For the first time, I’ve decided to use subtitles as a visual element of its own—not just as translation, but as an extension of the scenography. It’s a way to open the work to an international audience while staying deeply rooted in the original languages and cultures.
Interview conducted by Julie Ruocco in January 2025.