Three Silhouettes. In a Day, in a Night, in a Life
Three Silhouettes. In a Day, in a Night, in a Life
Sunday, 7 September 2025
h. 11.30 | Cedar of the Villa
“Fragmentation”
Concept and performance by Christophe Al Haber
Produced by Beirut Physical Lab
The starting question is: “What’s wrong with me?” The answer lies in Fragmentation, a solo performance exploring the disconnection and reconstruction of the body, its relationship with itself and with space. Through precise work on muscular tension, dimensions, orientation and movement patterns, the body breaks apart and reassembles, revealing its expressive potential. Gesture fragments in order to rediscover a new, different, necessary form of unity. Al Haber explores the body’s movement possibilities, navigating between control and instability through simple, repeated actions that at times become unpredictable: a dance between stillness and wild, dynamic motion. The artist’s debut work, Fragmentation began during the intensive Beiroot Bodies 3 program at Beirut Physical Lab and developed further during a residency at MACAM in Lebanon in late 2024. The performance premieres at Danza Urbana Festival as part of the NUOVI SGUARDI section, in collaboration with the partners of the newly established Solidarity in Motion network.
Christophe Al Haber is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work lies at the intersection of photography, contemporary dance, and live performance. His practice explores how emotions, memory and identity are conveyed, revealed and concealed through stillness and movement. With a background in physical theatre and shaped by lived experiences, Al Haber also uses photography not only as a method of visual documentation but as a performative act, a way to freeze time, inhabit space and embody states of being. He is currently an associate dancer at Beirut Physical Lab, where he continues to deepen his research into movement and collaborative performance practices.
Ancestral Echoes
Concept and performance by Samer Zaher
Co-creation by Bassam Abu Diab
Production Beirut Physical Lab
This creation emerges from a body understood as an archive, a site of memory, of rupture. It doesn’t begin with answers, but with absence: an orphaned body, a word severed from its meaning, a face read through the lens of otherness. Samer Zaher investigates how systems of power attempt to define, confine, and classify identity, through gender, nationality, race, and language. His movement practice resists these structures by returning to the raw physicality of the body, which becomes a space for reimagining identity beyond imposed labels. The work draws on a hybrid vocabulary of Dabke, Bollywood, Voguing, Baladi, Dancehall, contemporary dance, and physical theatre. These forms are not reproduced as cultural representations but are deconstructed and reassembled, treated as unstable fragments through which the body speaks on its own terms.
By distorting these traditions, Zaher challenges the audience’s first impressions and questions the very idea of cultural authenticity and purity. A performance that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation and contradiction, not as sources of confusion, but as sites of radical possibility.
Samer Zaher
is a lebanese artist who explores the body as a site and vehicle of memory and resistance. Trained at Beirut Physical Lab through the Beiroot Bodies program, he has performed in Alteration, Imprints and Frame, collaborating with the company’s associate artists and international guest choreographers.
Blending Dabke, Bollywood, Voguing and improvisation, he creates hybrid forms that challenge fixed notions of identity. Zaher performs internationally and leads workshops on embodiment, movement and belonging.
He makes his Italian debut at Festival Danza Urbana with his new creation Ancestral Echoes, as part of the Nuovi Sguardi section, supported by the partners of the Solidarity in Motion network.
