The choreographers / performers Rita Vilhena and Mohamed Shafik make in collaboration with Thomas Proksch the dance-theater piece "We are not from outer space", a show about us as human beings in relation to identity.

The money that we are asking €2500 is to pay the travels and the per-diem that will cover the creation process and the premier in Cairo at the D-CAF (Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival) in April 2012.

After a few meetings and a lot more discussions, Shafik and Vilhena agreed that they are not interested to express what makes her to be European and him to be Egyptian. Politics and economics are just tools we use to manage who we are. They contaminated us with a lot of information that we got used to calling ‘ours’, but which does not belong to us and therefore does not represent us. What is common to us is the lost feelings and, disbelieve in the power systems.
Our point with this project is to make a performance that reminds the audience what is sensitive in us, us being humans. We want to touch them with the fragility of a beautiful moment, like a blind man that has no eyes and uses the stick to see, and with a hairy monster that talks about his feeling to his father.
But can you really not be political?
We want to cross border, of language, geography and culture. We want to test the permeable frontier between the universe of things and deed and the universe of the imagination.
 
The interest to make this project starts in Alexandria when, through Dancing on the Edge and Nassim el Raqs Festival, Rita Vilhena and Mohamed Shafik met. Since May 2011 they have been in contact and in September they met again in Cairo at the Studio Emad Eddin Foundation to make to frame the project.

The piece:
“We are not from outer space” is a trio piece choreograph by Rita Vilhena and Mohamed Shafik in collaboration with Thomas Proksch.
 
More info visit: www.bailalouca.com

picture: Miquel de Jong