Saturday, 29 August, 2026 - 18:00

Showing: Where Writing begins, a dance begins too | all the rivers residency II

Hazem Saleh
Kenda Hmeidan
Mohamad Al Rashi
Amal Omran
Nowar Yusuf
Fatina Laila

where writing begins, a dance begins too

A residency continues, and opens its doors for a first sharing 

With audio description: to register for haptic tour and audio description please write us in advance to: alltherivers[at]ausland.berlin

Three months ago, a ten-day residency began with a question rather than a script: what was happening in the body of the person writing, at the moment these words were written? Working with a corpus of writing by women and LGBTQ+ authors from the Arab world — with a particular focus on Syria between 2012 and 2024 — the process treats these texts not as literature to be staged, but as dramaturgical structures: material read together, discussed, and slowly worked back toward the bodily experience each text carries within it, before that experience is translated into movement, rhythm, and voice.

Where writing begins, a dance begins too. The residency starts from the conviction that these words were written with the whole body, not only the hand — and that this bodily trace can be recovered and moved through, long before it becomes choreography. 

Over those first ten days, this reading gradually became something else: a story. Out of the articles, testimonies, and theoretical frameworks the group worked through, the outline of a physical-theatre text began to take shape, and its characters started to form — built directly out of the voices, positions, and tensions found in the material itself, rather than invented apart from it.

For the next ten days, the group returns to this material to continue developing it — building on the story, the characters, and the physical and vocal language the first period of research has already produced.

At the end of this period, the group will share one scene from this emerging text with an audience for the first time: not as a finished performance, but as a work-in-progress showing — a way of pointing toward where this theatrical work, and the style carrying it, is headed. An invitation to witness where the research currently stands, and to think together about what it means for a body on stage to carry testimony that was never its own to begin with.

The showing will be followed by an open discussion with the audience.

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