The near-blind dancer Issam Zemmouri: ‘What I am now in is not the darkness, but the way there’

A dance solo where it is not about seeing, but about feeling: that is where Issam Zemmouri’s Countdown Turns around. Zemmouri (1994) fled Morocco because of his orientation and got asylum in the Netherlands in 2021 where he soon made a name for himself with his performances at home and abroad.

His new performance, which will premiere at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, ‘Powered by Zid Theater’, is a search for a method to let people who are bad or blind to enjoy art.

After entering, visitors receive a night mask and have to follow the route to the room where the sound of water sounds and the scent of Jasmijn fills the room.

“When I go to a stage performance, I always sit in the front row and I miss 90 percent of what happens on stage.” Zemmouri suffers from a hereditary eye condition, rod begula dystrophy, which results in loss of face. He only has 4 percent vision, he calls it a beam of light that capitalized between him and the dark.

The senses are central to his performance; With the help of vibrations, scents, smoke, water and touches, he hopes to let visually impaired and blind visitors experience his art and attract other visitors in his world. “People have to learn to look with their fingers, I learned that too.”

Movement poetry

Zemmouri calls it a social and sensory experience that constantly changes because his life does that too. “This is a kind of life performance for me, so every month, maybe six months you will see a different version.” It is also a way for him to explore the principles of art, where the emphasis is not on the light or the decor, but on that one person in a further empty, dark room without music, but with a lot of spoken word and poetry that he plays with his body, ‘movement poetry’. “In the dark,” he pauses to think for a moment, “everyone has to lean on his senses.”

Zoom in

Zemmouri talks animated, you don’t see him that his vision is almost completely gone. Colleagues sometimes forget that he can barely see, he says, because he moves smoothly through the spaces and the street. That is because he has done everything so often, ‘repeated’, that he knows exactly where to walk, to which platform he should and where his things are in the house. But if there is a train failure or a change in platform, “I have bad luck.”

Zemmouri has visited for three long years of hospitals in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany in the hope of healing, but has now resigned himself to that there is no solution for him. “It is a kind of fade-out. It was very strange for me to have to accept this. How can I still live, I thought. How can I continue to work, dance, act. I also wondered why I was afraid of dark, perhaps it is not an enemy and it can be a friend. I am not yet there-but I have noticed something else to do something else for it, my stupid ones, my stupid ones, my stupid ones, my stupid ones for it, my stupid ones for it. sharper. ”

From his performance:

Don’t be afraid of the dark …

Maybe it’s not an enemy, but a silent friend. A hiding place,

Where your soul starts to shine before your eyes ever see light.

Dark? It is only the absence of light. Not anymore.

But maybe … exactly what you needed

To find the light in yourself.

Zoom in

Video calling with his mother

“The darkness takes over my life in a soft way. It is going steadily. I don’t even notice that I notice that I no longer see certain things.” He mentions things in the house as an example, but also video calling with his mother in Morocco. Because of the light he still perceives, he can enlarge her photos on the mobile to see her face. He tries to plant his mother’s photo in his memory, for fear that when it takes over, he can no longer see her face in front of him. For him, that beam light is the remaining connection with the outside world. “I see from the way someone moves who it is, a friend or sister. The light that I still see helps me remember things. What I find now is not the darkness, but the way to it.”

He misses to see something and immediately know what it is and he misses coloring. Sometimes, he admits, it is better not to realize what is happening in your life and just to continue. His performance is a way to express these far -reaching changes. “Art is not a luxury for me, but a way to show people what is happening in life. Art is there to scream.”

It feels like Zemmouri as if he should flee for the second time in his life; The first time leaving Morocco and now to a life full of darkness, because the light in his eyes goes out. “I have no choice. It’s like a trip for me, I go to another place and I don’t know if I will be welcome there, what options I will have and if I will be able to do a lot.”

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