BID Platform, is one of the projects that MT Dance is developing in order to establish a contemporary dance scene in Beirut. For this reason, the project aims at encouraging young artists to search for new forms and ways of expression that question the age’s anxieties and contradictions.
It also encourages the audience to look at dance from a contemporary point of view, and to engage themselves within new concepts of the body and performance as a whole. Our goal is to create a space for cultural exchange and interaction between Lebanon and the Arab and International World.
Omar Rajeh | Maqamat Dance Theatre ( LE)
Mental Masturbation
Thursday 22nd of April
8:30 pm | Monnot Theatre
Saturday 24th of April
8:30 pm | Monnot Theatre
The work deals with the idea of self-image in relation to consequent feelings that result from an excessive and intense emotional incident. Feelings of guilt and regret that haunt us in our inability to cope with an ideal human image presented by society and religion, and that became like an iconic sign, which directs our lives and beliefs. An unmarried woman gives birth, she will be kept in a dark room under the family house. The woman forgets herself, her body, and even her child….
The brides deal with women. Women feelings. Women thoughts. Women in general. It is also a story of one woman in particular. A bride. Who does NOT want to get married. Who is endlessly questioning her own feelings. Towards men. |Towards other women. It is not a message that marriage is bad. It is not a message that anything is neither good nor bad. It is simply an exploration of one particular girl into herself. A journey into her inner thoughts, her childhood fears and dreams, a discovery of her deepest, darkest emotions, her suppressed feelings, those which society teaches us to ignore and conditions us to disregard. The inevitable questions constantly arising. Woman or girl? To love or to hate? Death or life? And some day my prince will come… Or will he?
From the front-lines of conflicts in Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Palestine, Korea, and the North; from Seattle to Genova, and the War on Terror in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq, The Fourth World War is the story of men and women around the world who resist being annihilated in this war.
While our airwaves are crowded with talk of a new world war, narrated by generals and filmed from the noses of bombs, the human story of this global conflict remains untold. The Fourth World War brings together the images and voices of the war on the ground. It is a story of a war without end and of those who resist.
The product of over two years of filming on the inside of movements on five continents, The Fourth World War is a film that would have been unimaginable at any other moment in history. Directed by the makers of This Is What Democracy Looks Like and Zapatista, produced through a global network of independent media and activist groups, it is a truly global film from our global movement.
From Improvisation to Montage: approaches and process
Lead by Toni Cots
Monday 12th of April
12:00 am | Monnot Theatre
12th until 16th of April (Presentation: 17th. April 2004)
The concept of montage does not only imply a composition of words, images, or relationships, above all, it implies the montage of rhythm, but not in order to represent or reproduce the movement. By means of the montage of rhythm, in fact, one aims at the very principle of motion, at tensions, at the dialectic process of nature or thought. Or better, at the thought, which penetrates matter, meaning ‘energy’.
The concept of energy is a concept both obvious and difficult. We associate it with external impetus, with an excess of muscular and nervous activity. However, it also refers to something intimate, something that pulses in immobility and silence, a retained power that flows in time without dispersing in space.
This workshop will focus on a series of actions at work, drawn from individual improvisations.
These actions will then be isolated and set on a sequence or series of sequences, by the use of montage. The workshop intends to reveal and give to the participants, the resources and the means with which to approach and further develop their own dramaturgy, meaning to go from movement to physical action.
The workshop aims at introducing to the dancer/performer an awareness of his body. A point that s/he will feel, visualize and carry through movement into new territories of the body and its potential. The body is guided into an interior breath towards lines, directions, and circular paths. To feel, is to trust the body’s movement from within an interior space charged with emotions in its ‘correct’ value. Listening and letting go of the natural circuit of the body without imposing an external emotion because, the emotion is already present and it is the guide for the body in its movement.