The mesmeric Lebanese choreographer Ali Chahrour’s favoured working pattern is thematic, as if to reflect the ‘interconnections’ of Lebanon’s intricate cultural landscape itself (Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage)
Interconnections” is the preferred word of Ali Chahrour, the compelling Lebanese choreographer. “Interweavings” might be the deeper, more poignant allusion.
An early trilogy settled on the theme of Death. Fatmeh (2014), Leila’s Death (2015) and May He Rise And Smell The Fragrance (2017), all evocatively titled, evolved from funeral liturgies, finding a confluence between the orthodox and the modern.
When the theme of love was invoked, the trilogy was built upon to comprise a quartet — Night (2019), Told By My Mother (2021), Iza Hawa (2023) and concluding with The Love Behind My Eyes (2022).
Over decades since its independence, Lebanon has been guided by a series of pacts between the diverse communities that forge its complicated cultural mosaic. While the act of “interweaving” has been its yearning, from the time of its independence to the Cedar Revolution of 2005, this fragile, dazzling nation set in the marvelous Levant has experienced great shifts of fortune, from the brutal to the prosperous, always seeking to assert its distinctiveness even as it sought to avert great power politics in the restive region of West Asia.
Here, in its novels, music and dance, the feminine is a constant — serving as the keeper of memory (the art, and act, of enduring) in the midst of fragmentation and bitter civil wars. From the plaintive voice of the legendary popular songstress Fairuz to the quiet tensions in the House of Matilde, the deft and delicate novel by one of Lebanon’s most evocative contemporary novelists Hassan Daoud, the feminine arc culminates in a much recited poem by Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis refracted in the image of a woman, a mother. The poet named his work History is Ripped Apart in the Body of a Woman, with the stark lines: “The night driver tumbles, and the stars wince at his horses. The stars are an explosion that comes and goes, to my head the playground where it plays.”
“Pity the Nation” was the journalist Robert Fisk’s brilliant encapsulation of “Lebanon at War”. Fragmentation, dismemberment, on “the slopes of Lebanon”, has perhaps been the consistent lament of a national idealisation that never came to be. More evocative has been the tensions and anguish that lurk in the quiet corners of individual homes, of neighbours, or mothers and their sons.
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Chahrour picked up the metaphorical gauntlet left by Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, “If I must die, you must live to tell my story.”
Of his Told By My Mother, Chahrour has said, “Two stories unfold: one about a mother whose son disappeared in Syria and another about a mother who protected her son from becoming a fighter, and would have likely died on the field. Part of the inspiration comes from the real story of how my aunt’s son went missing after crossing into Syria to renew his papers. She did everything to find him but passed away from cancer without ever knowing what happened. It is really about extreme forms of love, death and the people involved, facing political and religious ideals, and making a statement, an act of resistance against the violence, through the voices of mothers.”
From the outset, “interconnectedness” is rooted not merely in the confluence of movement, music and text, but in the rupture, the cacophonous and its resolution in the lament. The sustained pitch in all of Told By My Mother is the elegiac, the thread that binds the shimmering modernity with the ancient pathos of grief rituals.
The performance itself commences with an “invocation to bring back the missing” — a call to the elements itself: “O Sender of the Winds, O Breaker of Dawn, O Breather of Spirits, O Generosity and Absolution, O Bearer of Every Key, O Heeder of Every Sound, O Knowledge of the Unseen, O Reviver of Departed Souls, O Saviour in my Distress, O Companion in my Estrangement, O Serenity in my Loneliness, O Warden of my Bliss, O Sanctuary in my Uncertainty, When my Kin Abandoned Me …”
The incantatory, delivered with such mastery by Hala Omran, possesses both an evocativeness and discipline that it provides the emotional throb that evolves in layers. The score, performed by Ali Hout and Abed Kobeissy (of Two or the Dragon), adopting both the experimental and the traditional, in particular the stark sound of the stringed Byzuq, and which later plays the symbolic role of the gesture of bequest, provides a sheen of greater and greater intensity.
The movements of Chahrour are electrifying, creating both a physical passage as well as a vessel for the narrative in a series of body waves and convulsions. It is delicately and astutely paced and the movements, eventually ranging the whole stage, offer a sense of the undulation of story, and emotion that is to come.
Perhaps the most salient aspect of the choreography is the obvious generosity that is offered. Told By My Mother is most intimate in the aunt, stolidly performed by the choreographer’s own aunt Leila Chahrour, who is ever present on stage, and cousin Abbas al Mawla — rotund and full bellied — eventually makes an appearance. Here, the artfulness of the ordinary that is ever apparent in the expressions of rapture in joy and a contained derangement in despair is displayed. They dance in celebration before the coming of a demise.
The “interconnections” are played out in the exchange of roles — the singer and reciter Hala Omran beckoning the role of another aunt. The performance ends with the tearing off of the head scarf, the most dramatic act of expressing grief, as the elder Leila Chahrour descends to her knees and arranges the hair of Hala Omran. It culminates with a searing wail, not of an unbridled kind, but that of a ritualised, mannered cry, an effort at release, known here in the Malay world as lepas.
At the close, the singing of a lullaby from the Sumerian, and then a crude recording of voices, singing a song of promise is played and again, the capturing of the everyday ordinary is touched with the symbolic, the eternal, encapsulated in the lost son or, as commonly referred to in the lands of conflict, “the Disappeared”.
Remembrance, as has often been recounted, is the beauty and curse of the age of the fallen. Chahrour’s Told By My Mother is where “the fallen” find voice, and in its convulsions, incantations, poetry and the ordinary, it invokes, in marvelous, the powers of resurrection, even if only in gesture and memory.
Ali Chahrour’s 'Told By My Mother' was performed as part of the Singapore International Festival of Arts, organised by Arts House Limited.
This article first appeared on July 14, 2025 in The Edge Malaysia.
