Un|Controlled Gestures – 4th Edition

The project “Un|Controlled Gestures” has been taking place at HAU Hebbel am Ufer since 2022. The fourth edition brings together new works by seven choreographers from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Tunisia. Following residencies in Cairo, Dresden and Berlin, HAU is offering insights into their work in progress. The focus is on the theme of trembling: the artists search for a dance vocabulary around trembling and shaking – as a physical expression of political, social and personal experiences.

The curatorial frame invites artists to reflect upon present instability, reshaping bodily knowledge into new performative vocabularies, challenging inherited forms, embracing transformation, and allowing movement to articulate multiple layers of intimate and collective experiences. They open up individual artistic explorations and at the same time explore sources of strength, vulnerability, poetry and resistance.

“Un|Controlled Gestures” sees itself as a platform for choreographic works in contemporary dance that deal with body politics and poetics as well as intimate and collective memories – memories that go beyond the known and documented. The jury for the seven selected projects for this edition consisted of Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi, Ghada El-Sherbiny, Petra Poelzl and Samaa Wakim.

In addition, on 19 and 21 April, HAU will present works by Samaa Wakim and Islam Elarabi, who developed the still touring works “Losing It” and “Just One Tile” as part of “UnControlled Gestures”.

Programme

23.4.
Christophe Al Haber
Momen Nabil

24.4.
Ahmed Ben Abid
Intermission
Emran Alamareen
Dana Amer

25.4.
Hadir Nached
Intermission
Moayed el Ghazouani

Ahmed Ben Abid
“Unknown Sea – كيف سأخبر البحر أننا نغرق على اليابسة”
“Unknown Sea” traces a body navigating resilience and hope. Ahmed Ben Abid uses repetitive daily gestures to unfold, stretch, and mutate, as fragments of voices and distant calls permeate the space. The work moves between presence and absence – from intimate interiors like a family kitchen to the charged threshold of a state border. The performer reaches toward those who remain, while fleeting figures surface and dissolve: some pass through, others depart, some vanish entirely. Within this shifting and intimate landscape, the body searches for a place to belong, and a direction yet to be found.

Choreography, interpretation: Ahmed Ben Abid
Residency support: L’ArtRue Dar Bachhamba Residency (Tunis, February 2026) and RedSapata / Sonnenstein Loft Residency (Linz, January 2026)

Christophe Al Haber
To Remain – ليبقى
A body shaped by an environment filled with grief and rage, searches for strategies of survival in a turmoil world . Reflecting on how the body is formed under control, restriction, and invisible systems of authority and power, it is slowly marking its own containment  space on stage. Within this limited frame, the body becomes both subject and territory. It compresses, adapts, resists. It learns when to shrink, when to expand, when to remain still.  To survive, the body submits to routines, repetitions, and imposed systems. Exhaustion is no longer a consequence, but a condition.

Concept, choreography, performance: Christophe Al Haber
Sound design support: Ahmed Ben Abid
Thanks to: Amalgam Studio (Beirut)

Dana Amer
“Nice to smell you”
Triggered by a sudden appearance of smells, followed by flashbacks of a past she tries to avoid. A solo performance of her exhausted body, filled with tension, as she repeats, resists, and adjusts, searching for a way to settle within a constantly shifting reality to sounds that accompany her state, echos of  the  tuning of instruments   at Damacus t conservatory  glass breaking after the explosion in the port of Beirut. She is pulled into unwanted journeys, where memory insists and refuses to disappear,   Her body falls and finds ways to continue with all that she carries and cannot escape.

Soundtrack : “The Key to Exit” by Deena Abdelwahed
Thanks to Alina Amer

Emran Alamareen
“Believing the told, belying the perceiver –تصدیق الخبر وتكذیب النظر”
In this solo, Emran Alamareen traces a living connection between past and present and his Bedouin living culture. Through movement, he evokes the resilience of the tent, the persistence of fire, and the pull of the eastern wind across open space. Echoes of nomadic life emerge and fade Drawing from lived memory and inherited gesture, the work embodies “Dhe’een” – the cyclical journeys of seasonal caravans—where the body moves with the land, not on the land.

Music: Beduinen in Al-Mreigha, southern Jordan – 1990s (full segment)
Program produced by: Jordan Television
Directed by: Ali Abu Jneib Al-Fayez, Shaher Al-Hadid
Thanks to: Ryuji Yamaguchi

Hadir Nached
غَزل (Ghazl)
“It all started from my mother’s eye, but it didn’t stop there.” In “ Ghazal”, Hadir Nached traces the gaze from its most intimate childhood experiences into the different layers of being watched , where the fragile line between the personal and the collective begins to blur. The performance attentively follows a body formed through intimate rituals of learning how to exist under watchful eyes. Taking shape through highly sensitive physical language marked by vulnerability, high-tension repetition, and charged stillness, the work unfolds into silence: Her body transforms using the breath and the containment that is put onto it.

Concept, text, choreography and performance: Hadir Nached
Present in video and sound: Zeinab El Sheikh
Videography: Özge Tuncali, Abd El Rahman Nached
Sound design: Abd El Rahman Nached.
Thanks to: Georgia Moffa, Omar el Taweil, Radek Lukasik

Moayed el Ghazouani
“Thor” – ثور
Caught between the mud of the Medjerda river and the glow of a lunar green eclipse, the body becomes a vessel for the Arboun rhythms and Tabbal Jendouba – a traditional Tunisian percussion instrument. Moayed El Ghazouani explores the space between anthropological history and personal loss, shifting from ancestral rituals towards complex emotions about life and death. Through rage and eroticism, “Thor”, which stands for bull in tunisian dialect, is a choreography, a luminous journey of exhaustion and poetic collapse – a performative act of archiving the present for a future yet to be written.

Concept, choreography, performance: Moayed Elghazouani
Sound design: Molka Chaaben, based on original recordings by Walid Mediouni and Mounir Kazziza
Music: Nasreddine Chorfi – Tir el borni
Residency Support : Massari & Al Badil (Tunisia)

Momen Nabil
“What Her Hands Remembered”
Across cultures, antlered figures embody cyclical renewal. The Celtic deity Cernunnos and Herne the hunter stand between life and death. In search of the fragile pulse of life that insists on staying, this work is an act of negotiating with decay. It begins from fragility and does not hide deterioration but works inside it. Flesh meets sharp edges. Beauty that exists inside pain. Contact and poke become a way of seeking proof of existence and a method of testing life at its boundaries. Antlers grow, fall, and grow again.“What Her Hands Remembered” searches for life in the fragile, it insists to stay, to stay even just for a little bit longer.

Music: Farida Gasser
Branches craft inspiration: Safaa Sherif
Special thanks to: Karima Mansour, Youssef Salah, Nabil Bakry, Menna Nabil and Pablo de Echevarria