SāHO - Nivine Kallas

As part of the Saison Méditerranée 2026, we present a double bill introducing two Lebanese choreographers, Nivine Kallas and Khouloud Yassine, as powerful as they are compelling.

Nivine Kallas explores the resonances and points of tension between gesture and speech, developing a choreographic language of a singular formal quality, with variations that are at once delicate and powerful.

Her dance engages in dialogue with the Arabic language, its script and rhythm, its inflections and its silences.

In SāHO, she looks specifically at how this language reflects, in Lebanon, an education system more attached to the rigidity of tradition than to the transmission of a fragmented collective memory.

Recalling the classroom, looking out the window and dreaming of escape, Nivine Kallas at first seems absent from herself, as though withdrawn into an inner exile. But her dissent is silent, and little by little her body enters into resistance.

Guided by intuition, she unfolds a fragmented gestural language, stretched between repression and elevation, fragility and determination.

By reclaiming an Arabic language she was never able to freely inhabit, she transforms constraint into a power of emancipation; her dance then draws its intensity from a deep attentiveness to the world around her.