Categoreez

On the red carpet of his new piece, Mrabtifi sweeps away compartmentalized thinking, in a mixture of aesthetics and scenic codes. Set in a near future where solitude and division steered by the powerful would have become the norm, he presents a minimalist cabaret where the protagonists share their stories and meet each other, in spite of the categories that separate them.

Mrabtifi: 'People make up rules to divide and categorize, but life itself is stronger than human will. Weeds grow without asking permission and our climate is at work everywhere: winds rush through cities and forests without discriminating. Are we really going to spend the last days of the apocalypse gazing at the things which divide us?'

Mrabtifi invites us into a parallel universe where three performers - Justine Theizen, Naim Belhaloumi and Alae-Eddine Belmiloudi - play with the histories, dance styles and categorizations embedded in their bodies, while musician and composer Stef Heeren sends his fiery soundtrack reverberating through the space.

These protagonists, who belong to different categories that society tends to oppose, embark on an epic adventure in search of their own singularity. Not to distance themselves from the other, but quite the opposite. Rather as a tender attempt to come closer to one another. Just as chameleons blend into their environment, together the performers transform themselves.

Mrabtifi: 'Categoreez is a tribute to the encounter with oneself as a way to meet the other; to freedom and to the mixing of genres of all kinds. It is also an invitation to all those with multiple identities, who do not fit into a single social, ethnic or cultural group and who may have difficulty finding their place in a society of standardized categorization - an invitation to join us on the red carpet and to shine on it.'

Mrabtifi thus takes us into the world he dreams of, where everyone can be themselves without shame or fear. Categoreez is an ode to freedom – not as an abstract ideal for the future, but as a celebration of the here and now, the art of the present moment.

Update 16.02.2022