Born in Syria and now based in France, choreographer and performer Mithkal Alzghair presents Paisiblement, a work deeply rooted in the tragic history of contemporary Syria, while speaking to universal human experiences.

Created on May 26, 2026, Paisiblement is inspired by the atrocities committed against the Druze community in the summer of 2025 by the Syrian regime in Suwayda.

At the end of 2023, an uprising broke out in Sweida, a Druze region, driven by songs and traditional dances, before later being suppressed. It was around the same time that the war in Gaza began. I was struck by a video showing a man who was also dancing while bombs were falling around him.

Alongside two other performers and a musician on stage, Mithkal Alzghair explores the physicality of dancing bodies and their capacity for resistance. He poses the following question:

How can a peaceful body, through its mere presence, stand against the machines of war that shape our history?

To answer this question, Mithkal Alzghair drew from a vast repertoire of traditional dances shaped by oppression: Palestinian dances, Syrian dances, but also Native American dances. Not to reproduce them, but rather to imagine, within their shared crucible, a new form of insurrection, one that is both choreographic and universal.

In the face of threat, bodies express a need to affirm an identity, a distinctiveness, and traditions. What the new Syrian regime is trying to do is erase all differences.

In a deliberately minimalist staging, Mithkal Alzghair plays between the singular and the universal, making Paisiblement the embodiment of every revolt. The dancers hold placards with nothing written on them because they could say anything; they are dressed in dark colors, the color of mourning. Yet for them, it is also the color of hope and resistance.

I would like the audience to see in this performance a physical need for resistance against what the media do not speak about. And I also want to convey the idea that art is precisely what is capable of speaking through silence.