OUELD Jalleba: Dancing performance by Rochdi Belgasmi

"OUELD JALLEBA" is a known figure in the world of popular arts in Tunisia but, paradoxically, little known among Tunisians. He appeared in the 20s in Bab Souika in Tunis and worked in the singing café "Sallit Dziri". He was much demanded by the public of the medina, which ignored in most time his sexual identity. He, and other transvestites’ dancers were no longer capable of practicing their art once women had the right to dance in public café, with the resistance and women’s liberation movement in Tunisia. The project is a dance in tribute to figures of folk dancers, less known or which have fallen into oblivion or have been discarded and rejected by the society, such as Oueld Jaleba. 

Artist presentation: 
Rochdi BELGASMI, Dancer and choreographer, is a leading figure of the Tunisian contemporary dance. Post Revolutionary Artist, Rochdi BELGASMI is attached to and concerned by the news of the dance in Tunisia after January 14, as well as its history, which he tries to be a witness. Since then, he is looking for an alternative language beyond fashion, a language which we cleverly exploit in the contemporary dance thinking process to work on the local dances.
By querying the corpus of the contemporary dance in Tunisia, Rochdi Belgasmi decided to go to the popular dances to develop choreographic work with a very personal gesture of focusing on his basin. After performing several pieces of him in which he dances such as Trance, Zoufri, Wa Idha Aassayatom, and other choreography shows like El Mansia El Zaglama, or Striptease, in which he addresses known figures in the Tunisian popular dance, such as "Zina wa Aziza ", "Aicha wa Mamia ", "Zohra Lambouba", "Bahria", "Khira", "Laghbabi" etc…. Tunisian celebrities, Rochdi BELGASMI decides today to move towards less known figures or which have fallen into oblivion or have been discarded and rejected by the society because of their way of dancing, like "OUELD JALEBA" which will be the subject of his next choreography work.

This event is supported by The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture

« The work of Rochdi BELGASMI, it’s on a knife edge. With, for purpose, ever new paradox: pure as a Chinese line, may be seen or from one side or the other. The exhibition of the intimate and the most commonly shared, the questioning of tradition and contemporary: this is probably the most profound challenge of the dance of Rochdi BELGASMI. This already provides a working method: the "meta-dance» and an artistic form: the "solo-in-common". When Rochdi BELGASMI track in 2011, in his solo Trance: haunted body, something like "The Fool's Diagonal" between traditional Berber songs and contemporary choreographic rewriting, it is to ask what makes him move, and what, in him, move the spasms of the scene. And when extending this diagonal, two years later, in an oblique clearly swaying but no less crazy with the male "Rboukh" of Zoufri, it is to work harder in the drawn bow of this contradiction, without getting stuck in his little story. Comment parvenir toutefois à dérouler les fils ? No recipe. For Rochdi BELGASMI, it is always about a long research work, an extraction to take the body against the grain. Between tradition and contemporaneity, the body constantly involves. And for good reason. As in Wa Idha Aassaytom (meta-dance), his latest 2014 solo, which play transgression and forbidden by the sexualisation of the choreographic game, the challenge of Ouled Jelaba is to dare -but everything else, to dare to remove the dance of the "singing cafés" to the level of a contemporaneity»
Adnen JDEY –Tunisian Philosopher

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Jawad Chaaban: sound engineer
Lara Nassar: Light operator and Stage manager
Stage technician & Light Operator: Nabil Abou el Heijaa
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Wheelchair access available upon request