The Rooster

This film will be presented during the La Nuit de la danse event on March 21^st, 2025 at Théâtre Outremont.

​“In our neighborhood lives a rooster. In our neighborhood lives a sadistic rooster who kills !”. Based on the poem Al Deek (The Rooster) by Nizar Qabbani and created in response to the August 4^th explosion in Beirut, this dance piece experiments with the baladi form to depict the journey of a dictator. The film explores the dark side of power through the story of an innocent child’s rise to power, her relationship with the feminine, and her intimate connection to inevitable downfall.


Director’s statement:
Al Deek project was developed as a response to the Beirut August 4^th explosion as a way for me to cope with its impact, meaning and aftermath.The strength and the weight of Nizar Qabbani’s words of Al Deek/​The Rooster poems resonated with the feeling of loss and gravity the event generated. I used the poem to overcome and make sense of the explosion and chaos, and at the same time its rhythm and form helped structure the creative process and expression of movement. The poem centers around the Dictator illustrated by the Rooster and working on it empowered me in the need to level with the dictator figures responsible for shadowing the incident by immersing myself into the world of power. But it had to be done through embodiment and with the dance form I know best, Baladi dance. The poem inspired the creation of a storyline and the development of main characters that somehow illustrated the questions that were going through my mind, and while embodying these I asked. What is this complex relationship we have with power? Why do we create these power structures? What does this dictator figure symbolize for us? Questioning those who embody the dictator figures in our society, whether they are people, groups or countries, and the current Patriarchal governance, how can we address the toxic dominant masculinity that rises from it? Why does it always end in the hoarding of power at any cost? This choreography also features the Chicken figure, who represents the feminine, and its relationship to the oppressive patriarchal figure of the dictator, through her I tried to question the reasons why we are so seduced by power, and reflect on the dangers of identifying with power by falling in its trap reproducing this never ending cycle of war and violence. It was interesting for me to work with Baladi dance ​“Belly dance”, a form that has been stereotyped, ​‘Othered’, and objectifies the female body and to explore it to create different movement languages for each character, or to use to same language in different manners for the dictator’s beginning and later stages. Somehow portraying masculine figures helped to subvert gender roles and highlighted a cultural and societal obsession with power in its various materializations of dictatorship. When the choreography was born, Chadi Younes, the director, joined to collaborate on this project, and this visual piece was born.The landscape provided the setting for this story, and the story was now being told through film and choreography. We aimed to create a dialogue and experiment with what can happen between poetry, dance, and film.
- Chadi Younes