Knot – Afra Al Dhaheri & Dovydas Stramaitis | Just One Tile – Islam Elarabi

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Two solo dance works push the boundaries of contemporary dance, bringing movement into conversation with sculpture, street culture, identity, and freedom.

The evening features:

• Knot – dance meets sculptural installation.
• Just One Tile – Mahraganat and contemporary dance meet in a powerful solo about identity, resistance, and belonging.

Knot – Afra Al Dhaheri & Dovydas Stramaitis
Co-commissioned by The Arts Center, Knot unfolds at the intersection of choreography and visual installation. Long hair extensions gradually become rope, stretching from the performer’s body to the ceiling and surrounding space. The resulting web supports her, restricts her, and shapes every movement, turning the installation itself into part of the choreography.

Building on Al Dhaheri and Stramaitis’s ongoing exploration of hair, Knot looks at identity, culture, and transformation through the relationship between body and material. Hair becomes rope, body becomes structure, and movement becomes inseparable from the space around it.

Just One Tile – Islam Elarabi
Just One Tile is a solo by Egyptian dancer and choreographer Islam Elarabi, bringing Mahraganat and contemporary dance together through emotions of power, pride, fear, anger, joy, and resistance.

Drawing on lived experience and collective memory, Elarabi transforms the energy of Egyptian street culture into movement. Rooted in Mahraganat, the music and dance culture that emerged from Cairo’s streets, the work challenges its dismissal as “non-art” and reveals its social, political, and emotional force.

With minimal elements, Elarabi creates a physical language that moves between struggle and release. A single floor tile becomes a space for identity and survival, while moments of intense movement meet vulnerability and restraint.

The work also draws on the spirit of Cairo’s Tahrir Square and its associations with collective resistance and the pursuit of freedom.

First presented as a work-in-progress during the UN|Controlled Gestures Residency in Cairo and Berlin, Just One Tile continues to evolve as an intimate exploration of struggle, resistance, and belonging.

Experience two distinct performances where movement carries more than choreography, opening space for questions of identity, constraint, resistance, and freedom.