Your work focuses on the gestures and symbolism associated with the machta, an emblematic figure in Tunisian nuptial rituals. What prompted your interest in this subject? And why do you think it is particularly relevant today to explore it in the form of a performance?

Amira: My work in the visual arts is rooted in questions of heritage and family rituals, the ones I grew up with and the ones I was raised on. The figure of the machta emerged in the course of my research into my grandfather’s rituals, and imposed itself on me as both a discreet and central presence in women’s rites of passage. She embodies a silent yet profoundly active form of femininity, a savoir-faire passed down from woman to woman – from my grandmother to my mother – and which I now reinterrogate through my body and the costumes and accessories I have inherited. After an initial work in the visual arts entitled Bent El Machta (“daughter of the machta”), this performance extends the reflection by anchoring it in the living. It questions what remains of these gestures and knowledge in our bodies, and what they say today about our relationship to ritual, care, community and heritage.

The machta, who plays a key role in the preparation of the bride during nuptial rites in the Sahel region of Tunisia, embodies a certain form of femininity. How did you choose to reinterpret this figure through dance and performance? What aspects of this tradition did you wish to highlight?

Amira & Rochdi: We chose to explore the invisible part of the machta‘s work, which takes place in the privacy of the bride’s room, when she is being prepared. Through the preparations and traditional costumes, we sought to make this stage visible, showing gestures imbued with care and transmission. It’s these bodily rituals – the touch, the rhythms, the attentions – that have touched us deeply, as they tell of the place of women and a collective memory. The performance reveals these intimate gestures, situated on the border between the sacred and the trivial.

Music and, in particular, vocals play an essential role in this performance. How do they interact with dance in this context? What does movement contribute to speech, and vice versa?

Amira & Rochdi: The songs, made up of words, prayers and rhythms, support and intensify the gesture. They act as a catalyst for movement, while dance extends this connection and reveals its full emotional charge.

Does Tunisian folk dance, rich in its many facets, play a role of memory and transmission in this performance? How can dance both preserve and reinvent ancient traditions, particularly those linked to the role of women in Tunisian society?

Rochdi: I have been working on Tunisian folk dances since 2011, the year of the revolution. These dances convey an aesthetic and a symbolism deeply linked to daily life in Tunisia. They are the bearers of memory, and vectors of cultural transmission within society itself. Through them, a form of Tunisian identity or uniqueness emerges in this performative work. By exploring dances such as Fazani, Jelwa and Bounaouara, I wanted to question the relationship between contemporaneity and the popular dimension of these practices. Taking these dances out of their social and cultural contexts to place them on an experimental stage is a delicate gesture: the risk is always to deprive them of their symbolic and historical charge. Preserving while reinventing was the objective of this project, which began fourteen years ago. The work also explores gender relations and the tensions between femininity and masculinity in dance. So-called feminine dances are performed by a male body, and vice versa. This inversion of roles and blurring of the boundaries between feminine and masculine creates a kind of vertigo. The female dances I chose for this performance are linked to nuptial ritual and the celebration of fertility. Through them, I sought to mobilize and articulate parts of the body traditionally connoted as feminine – the belly, the pelvis, the hands – while using objects, accessories and costumes that accentuate the feminization of the male body’s movement.

Amira Lamti is a visual artist born in 1996 in Sousse (Tunisia), where she lives and works. A graduate in photography and visual arts, she explores gestures, rituals and forms of heritage through photography and video. Her work has been exhibited in Tunisia and Spain, and presented at festivals such as JAOU (2024) and the Image Festival Amman (2025). She has been in residence at Hangar Barcelona (2023) and Villa Salammbô (2025).

Rochdi Belgasmi is a dancer and choreographer born in 1987 in M’saken (Tunisia). A figure of the Tunisian contemporary dance revival, he questions gender representations in popular dance, both on stage, in research and through teaching. Since 2013, he has toured internationally: Palais de Tokyo, Institut du Monde Arabe, BOZAR, Friche Belle de Mai, and at festivals in Ouagadougou, Ramallah and Yaoundé. He was awarded the Prix de la Fondation Rambourg (2017) and regularly collaborates with the Dream City and JAOU biennials.