Mohamed El Khatib

FINIR EN BEAUTÉ • Alone on stage, Mohamed El Khatib turns his mother’s last years of live into a performance (she died unexpectedly on February 20, 2012). But this is neither a performance on sadness, nor on death. In his way, and resorting to simple means from his daily life—audio and video archive, mobile phone messages, e-mails, photographic records, newspaper clippings and memories—he rewrites his own story and revisits the strength of an endless love that, even if the body has an end, extends over time without limitation.


C’EST LA VIE • Mohamed El Khatib summoned two people with nothing in common for this performance: 61-year-old Daniel Kenigsberg, and 37-year-old Fanny Cartel. Two seemingly different people from separate generations, but a common grief: both lost a child three years ago: a 25-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl, respectively. Based on the tragic, never-ending story of these two actors, El Khatib creates a short, practical life handbook.

Mohamed El Khatib (1980, Beaugency) is a theatre director and writer. His work merges theatre with other disciplines (visual arts, film, dance and digital media), in order to evaluate the existing connection between the several fields. In 2008 he co-founded the Zirlib collective on the premise that aesthetics is never stripped of political meaning: art must be able to relate to everyday life. Every meeting is a starting point in Khatib’s work. He is an associated artist at the Théâtre de la Ville de Paris, Tours National Drama Centre – Théâtre Olympia and Bretagne’s National Theatre – European Center of Dance and Theatre.