What followed was an extraordinary year of uprisings which broke out pretty much all over the Middle East, a wave of protest which was soon rather over-optimistically dubbed the “Arab Spring”.

Almost every country in the region had its version of this Arab Spring These (r)evolutions – which, sadly, rarely brought solace – have been given widespread coverage by the media in recent years. 

What effect have all these images on other theatre directors and performers who live here in Belgium but have their roots in Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Syria, etc. How does it feel? How as an expat do you process all the information that comes to you from family and friends who stayed behind? What does that information do to your body? How does the body react to violence and fear? 

Together with three performers, Mokhallad Rasem looks for an answer to these questions through dance. Body Revolution is a guerrilla version of a show: made and performed in a short space of time for a limited public.

As well as touring Belgian schools, social organizations and refugee centres, the production has been staged in Uganda, Morocco, India, the United Kingdom, Spain, Egypt, Belgrade and the Netherlands.

“When the place you know and love becomes unstable, you have to follow suit. Perhaps that is the power of change: not your own desire to score ever better, but a physical confrontation between your inner space and the big outside world. Mokhallad Rasem cleverly represents the clash in Body Revolution, a performance installation in which three mummified men move in and out of projections of trashed Arab cities. Their memory draws them back, but their need to survive pushes them away again. Thus Artefact does what you expect all art to do: it focuses our minds on a social issue by complicating it.” - Wouter Hillaert in De Standaard, 18th of February 2015