Mohamed Toukabri can be seen both as the impish kid who used to perform acrobatic breakdance in the streets of Tunis, and as the performer trained between Tunis, Paris, and Brussels, collaborating with leading companies. His collaboration with Needcompany, founded in 1986 and known for interdisciplinary work spanning theater, dance, performing arts, visual arts, cinema, and film production, is historic (I still remember the powerful Marketplace 76 at the 42nd Venice Theatre Biennale). He is not lacking in courage: in 2023, he presented The Power (of) the Fragile, a stage encounter with his mother, whom he had not seen for several years. In Mestre, as part of the You Theater – Dance~Independent Music festival curated by Live Arts Cultures and Macaco, he presents the national premiere at Teatro del Parco on January 16 of Everybody-Knows-What-Tomorrow-Brings-And-We-All-Know-What-Happened-Yesterday. This work is an exercise in physical virtuosity, deeply connected to the conviction that the rules of movement writing must be revisited and that all forms of dance are fully legitimate.
Toukabri prompts reflection on the role of movement in society and ignites a new anti-colonial liberation struggle on the ground of imposed behaviors. He cites the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who at Avignon 2023 wrote: “The past not only tells us what happened yesterday, but illuminates what is happening today. History is contained in our gestures, in our movements, in our genetic memory.”
Revealing all of this is the task of a skilled choreographer. Notably, the voice creates a dialogue with the body through the texts of the Tunisian artist and activist Essia Jaïbi, who integrates words into movement, enriching the abstraction of gesture and generating an extremely layered interplay. The music and sound are by Anna Fröhlich, “composer, sound designer, sound technician and video artist for dance and theater,” who offers a hyper-technological reinterpretation of Surrealism. Her motto, “We are not prepared for what’s coming next,” evokes Joshua 24:14, urging liberation from pagan idols.

In your performances, there always seems to be a significant element of improvisation. Are you more influenced by your inner state, the audience, or the events happening in the world?
Personally, I don’t make a clear distinction between my inner state, the audience, and the events happening in the world. As we are constantly traversed by all these elements, we don’t dance alone, and we don’t create in isolation. As a maker, I create in relation to my surroundings. For me, choreography is not approached in a classical sense, but rather as a kind of border space, a threshold where dance meets other practices, histories, and energies. I think of choreography as a tool that brings different layers into relation: the physical body, the intellect, spiritual energy, and emotion – but also the poetical. In my work, I’m interested in contradictions, tensions, and frictions between elements: the dialogue between what is stable and what is unpredictable, the seen and the unseen, the spoken and the unspoken. The way we enter a space, the presence we bring, the quality of our movement – all these choices are both political and poetic gestures. It is very important for me to create a space of freedom for myself as a performer on stage, in which performance codes and rules are acknowledged, appropriated, and transformed in service of what is about to unfold. Often, a structure begins to emerge through repetition. With repetition comes familiarity, like in jazz music: improvisation within a form, freedom within a form. The work is very precious, and there is a clear structure through which the audience can orient themselves.
Rather than being influenced by a single source – myself, the audience, or the world – my work lives in the in-between, in the constant traversing that connects them. In my use of improvisation, a structure slowly emerges through repetition, not as a fixed form, but as something fluid, responsive, and alive. Like jazz, this process resists rigid Eurocentric modes of composition, embracing instead a space where intuition and collectivity guide creation. Improvisation becomes a decolonial act, a way of reclaiming freedom within form, allowing new ways of being, stage presences, rhythms, bodies, and knowledges to speak.

You have often said that the body carries the marks of history, such as colonisation, and that you are interested in their effects. How can the audience perceive this research?
That’s a very important and complex question for me. Before I answer, I would like to quote the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula, who once said in a conversation with the American choreographer Bill T. Jones: “How can I aim towards a poetical gesture while not forgetting the political context?” I really connect to these words. For me, they express a search for poetic freedom that also carries a deep sense of responsibility. When you understand the violence created by colonial systems, you can’t approach artistic work as something purely aesthetic or detached. For me, the body is a carrier of history. Through its own memories, it becomes a living archive holding traces of past experiences. The body remembers gestures, postures, rhythms, and even silences – all of this can contain fragments of cultural and historical memory. My work doesn’t try to explain or represent colonisation, but rather to question and unlearn its structures, especially those built on Eurocentric ideas of order, control, and clarity. By embracing fluidity, chaos, and multiplicity, I try to resist the colonial desire to categorise and fix meaning. In this way, the body can begin to free itself from imposed narratives.
I don’t think the audience needs to understand everything literally. Everyone comes to a performance with their own sensitivity, memories, and cultural background, which shape how they relate to the work. As spectators, we each share a responsibility to create the links between things. When I create, I try to stay aware of my position, of where I speak from, and of the spaces and institutions I work within. I take the audience very seriously. It’s important that everyone feels included, no matter their age or cultural background. That sense of inclusion is part of my responsibility as an artist. Through my work, I hope to create a space of togetherness, a shared moment where people from different backgrounds can meet. I am not there to provide comfort, but to create a mirror of our world, one that reflects critical questions while also reaching beyond them, touching our shared humanity. A space that reminds us that the other is also you, and you are also the other.

From a choreographic perspective, how do you highlight the question of the dancer’s position and role in today’s society?
For me, the dancer today is not just someone who performs choreography, but a body that thinks, listens, and reflects the world. In my work, I try to create spaces where the dancer has agency, where movement emerges from intuition and relation rather than from instruction. Through my work with different artists and choreographers, I have learned that dancers are active members of the creative process. We think, reflect, and participate intellectually as much as physically. Through body work and awareness, we become mirrors of our time and our societies, navigating uncertainty, tension, and transformation.
I think that’s how the question of the dancer’s role becomes visible – not through representation, but through presence. We are dancers, but we are also active citizens in the world. I believe there is power in the fragility of the space we hold between the world of dance and the world itself. In the end, these two worlds are closely connected, because we don’t dance alone; we are always moving in relation to others, to society, and to the world around us.

Could you tell us about the genesis of the performance we will see in Mestre, Everybody-Knows-What-Tomorrow-Brings-And-We-All-Know-What-Happened-Yesterday? We read your beautiful statement during the Avignon Festival, which we would like to quote, but here we would like to go back to the very beginning: to the first encounter with this idea.
In this work, Everybody-Knows-What-Tomorrow-Brings-And-We-All-Know-What-Happened-Yesterday began with an urge to question my 23 years of dance practice. To look at dance not only as a technique, but as a language, or rather, as multiple languages. I wanted to reflect on what kinds of knowledge have been transmitted to me, how these forms of knowledge relate to who I am, and what they reveal about the systems of knowledge production and transmission that shape the contemporary dance world. This questioning was nourished by conversations and exchanges with other artists, friends, and dancers who are exploring similar concerns – questions that are deeply connected to postcolonial and decolonial thought. One key influence during this process was the work of Grada Kilomba, a Portuguese artist, writer, and scholar whose research examines how knowledge is produced and who has the power to define it. Her reflections on coloniality and memory deeply resonated with my own experience as a dancer navigating different cultural and historical legacies. The project began with a short research period in 2023, during which I imagined a geographical triangle between Tunis, Brussels, and New York. These three places represent key stages in my artistic journey and embody the different dance histories that my body carries. Through this process, I realised that my body was both carrying and creating links between different histories – histories that are rarely mentioned in the official transmission of dance knowledge, whether in the history of “contemporary dance” or in academic dance curricula.
New York, for example, was the birthplace of both hip-hop and postmodern dance in the late 1960s and early 1970s – two movements that emerged from the same city, in the same period, yet have often been kept apart in the way dance history is taught. This made me wonder: how is it possible that these two worlds, born in the same time and space, never met within the institutional narrative of dance history?
I approached my body as an archaeological site, excavating the layers of dance heritage within me. My journey started as a b-boy (breakdancer) in Tunisia, immersed in hip-hop culture and its rich artistic, spiritual, historical, social, political, and poetic dimensions. Later, I encountered contemporary dance through a more French-colonial lens, and then, when I moved to Brussels to study at P.A.R.T.S., I was introduced to the history of American postmodern dance. It was there that I realised how what we often call “contemporary dance” is predominantly shaped by an American-Eurocentric narrative.
As a b-boy, the knowledge and movement language I carried were often looked down upon – revealing the hierarchies that still exist between dance forms. This made me question: why are certain dance languages considered more valuable, more legitimate than others? With this work, I wanted to challenge that hierarchy, to create a space where different dance languages could coexist, confront, and even collide. At its core, Everybody-Knows-What-Tomorrow-Brings-And-We-All-Know-What-Happened-Yesterday is a solo about transformation, allowing my body to embrace its complexities (with a big “C”): its multiple identities, histories, and contradictions. It’s not about providing answers, but about creating a living space where these questions can unfold through movement, memory, and reflection.