#1 Part
*ovember 28th 2023 - Morocco
Rabat / Villa des Arts;
Décembre 1st 2023 - Morocco
Casablanca / French Institute
Décembre 5th 2023 - Morocco
Marrakech / Dar Denise MAsson
March 9th 2024 - Scotland
Festival StAnza / St Andrews
March 14th-15th 2025 - Morocco
Nocturnes Patrimoines / Casablanca
Integral creation
27 to 29 MAY 2025
ABC / La Chaux de Fonds
Switzerland
From the Female Chimpanzee to Darwin
Poetic Stand-up performance in Arabic with English subtitles
with Mouna Ouafik (Arabic language)
direction Henri jules Julien
From the Female Chimpanzee to Darwin is a poetic stand-up piece by Moroccan Arabic poet Mouna Ouafik, whose scintillating autobiographical work is free of any demands other than the expression of the truth of her human being.
The stand-up poems are like letters written by the female chimpanzee (the poet herself) to Darwin, each describing a facet of the author's personality in her relationship to life, love, God, sex, Satan, her mother...
Mouna Ouafik's exercise in truth-telling, though without posturing or provocation, is not entirely acceptable at home. The stand-up show is therefore in two parts.
In the first part, #1 Holding matches in the great fire (created and performed in Morocco), Mouna Ouafik, tonic and funny, in sneakers, jeans and a pink Scooby-Doo T-shirt, launches her poetic stanzas like so many punchlines, in a crude and clownish way, with a punk energy but a palpable vulnerability.
In the second part, #2 Meat concentrate, Mouna Ouafik adorns herself in pearls and gilding and leads the audience into the flamboyant, torrid meanderings of the woman she is, too: sensual, unbridled, emotional, cruel, torn. Contemporary.
Surfing on all the codes of the genre, and above all the direct, almost physical relationship with the audience, which she sometimes goes so far as to almost touch, the stand-up is entirely in Arabic, with French surtitles that the pace of the performance makes it easy to follow.
Meat concentrate (excerpts)
Lying on my back,
I bite with you at the barbed wire round my heart as I cackle…
“What are you laughing at?”
I’m a sentimental fool who stores spices in the fridge and with her laughter rounds off those words of yours which wound her—its much cheaper than your radiance .
Lying on my belly,
I raze with you a wall of bricks that isolates my heart as I cackle…
“What are you laughing at now?”
The mobile’s hot in your hand and my heart is hot in mine. Reformatting frightens you, while I distrust the reboot.
Lying on my right side,
I chew with you through the broken beer bottles that ring my heart as I cackle…
“Ugh, what are you laughing at?”
In place of each other we have loved many boys and girls; like each of us is a DJ, going along with crowd. Which is how it is.
Lying on my left side,
I wreck with you the elegant iron railings, a bright lamp on each, around my heart, as I cackle…
“Come on! Why are you laughing?”
Here Love is like a barman at his counter. Your frankness is what a woman gets her man hot with when they fuck. My love, porn on xvideos is more modern than the new Arabic poetry.
(...)
translation Robin Moger