INVISIBLE STRUGGLES

Created and led by Selma and Soufiane Ouissi, LAAROUSSA QUARTET is a choreo-documentary for four performers, film and music, based on a corpus of millennia-old pottery gestures, directly transmitted to artists by the Berber women of Sejnana, Tunisia. Handicraft, dance, music and film are brought together to bring a fragile quality of the body to life. The Ouissi brother and sister describe it as the quality of “a free body that invents its own gesture”.

DREAM SOCIETY
“At the crossroads of art and craft practices”, they write, ”we have sought to honor this age-old movement while questioning its essence, its archiving and its transmission. Our approach is in line with the idea of a Dream Society, conceived on the fringes of the capitalist world, where the gesture, both fragile and powerful, becomes a political act of resistance. With Laaroussa, the aim is to capture what the micro-gesture shows: a shared memory, a living community, and a body at work inventing and creating,” say the Ouissi.

In February 2025, the entire artistic team travelled to Sejnane for a residency at the heart of the women potters' practice.

CAPTURING THE INVISIBLE
The show is based on an original gestural score imagined by Selma and Sofiane Ouissi, which blends artisanal and choreographic gestures. Originally conceived as a duo, this score is now reinterpreted by a female quartet. The performers embody a dialogue between resistance, resilience and the poetry of everyday life.

The video attempts to capture the invisible: the texture of the clay, the marks of labor on the women's bodies, and the transformation of the raw material into objects that are filled with stories. These visual fragments interact with the performers' movements to reveal the raw beauty and harshness of Sejnane's realities.

The music, the fruit of a collaboration between Aisha Orazbayeva (composition), Raphaël Henart (sound and mixing) and Tom Pauwels (dramaturgy), accompanies this creation in resonance with the gestures and images.

A PLEA FOR THE TRANSMISSION
Laaroussa Quartet is a work at the crossroads of disciplines and temporalities. It questions gesture in its ability to create links, transform matter and transcend borders. This choreo-documentary is conceived as an ode to invisible struggles, a plea for the transmission of fragile memories, and an invitation to reinvent living gestures in a world in perpetual mutation.