Khajal was created by Lucía Piquero with dancers Nikita Goile, Emma Louise Walker, and Stefania Catarinella during a choreographic residence in Le Performance, Bordeaux, France, in an intensive period of creation.
Based on a recent experience in a congress for performing arts in Palestine, where she discovered and experienced more about its people and customs. The piece works mainly on their most astonishing capacity: to feel joy, to turn dark situations into creative outputs. Inspired also by the Arabic calligraphy, the piece explores the idea behind the word “khajal”, that can mean both shadow and imagination, responding to this ability to turn dark issues into opportunities.
The work attempts to embody this difficult thematic and render it movement. Working through movement qualities, something that she has been exploring in her work (both practically, and theoretically through her PhD research and beyond), the emotional power of movement is explored. Although the work has a clear socio-political inspiration and aligns with a defence of the Palestinian community, it stays away from being preachy or obvious: it is an exploration of emotionality in dance, any statements are left to the audience’s interpretation.
A reworking of this piece toured in February 2020 in Malta and Spain, with dancers Florinda Camilleri, Zoe Camilleri, and Valentine Soucy, in a series of performances organised by ODT in collaboration with the Maltese embassy in Spain.
Choreography: Lucía Piquero
• Length: 12 min
• Performers: 3
• Language: English/Arabic
• Minimum performance area: 6m x 6m
