DIGNITY - Action Zoo Humain

On the fifteenth anniversary of the Jasmine Revolution, theater maker Chokri Ben Chikha turned his gaze back to Tunisia: the country where a popular uprising wrote world history and which today is once again confronted with social unrest, political instability, and international pressure regarding migration. Terwijl de Europese Unie is concluding strategic agreements to stop 'irregular' migration, Ben Chikha asks a sharp question: Can art still bring light where political discourse molts into fear and control? In DIGNITY, he takes on the dominant worldviews that determine who is seen and who is not. From the historical pain of the zoo humain, once used to exhibit colonized bodies for European entertainment, he draws the link to contemporary migration policy and the persistent colonial power structures that seep into it. Everyone has an opinion on migration. You too. Inspired by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the scene transforms into an open forum. Witnesses, performers, and the audience move between words, images, and bodies; past and present collide, touch, and broaden each other. The result is an urgent, uncomfortable, and at the same time disarming invitation to think along, speak along, and take responsibility for the gaze with which we look at "the other." DIGNITY builds on the international success of Ben Chikha's Truth Commission Trilogy. After PART I – the Belgische Senaat (2018) and PART II – the Nederlandse Eerste Kamer (2024), he and his company Action Zoo Humain take another step toward radical, site-specific political performance. We are not presenting PART III – DIGNITY in 2027 where he had hoped, namely in the Europese Commissie, but rather in a place in Brussels that became a refuge for many undocumented people. In 2024 and 2025, Ben Chikha and dramaturg Sietske de Vries traveled to Tunisia for thorough research. International director Peter Sellars wrote the following after seeing DiGNiTy in Tunis: Action Zoo Humain brings with Dignity a memorial service, a trial, an academic conference, a civil ceremony, a public hearing, and a family court together with a funeral, an excavation, a protest march, and a street fight, with an outburst, an interruption, and an interrogation, and with a human zoo. It is a happening and a well-mannered but radical comedy of anger and outrage. All of this confronts head-on the contradictions and the immensity, the pettiness and the heartlessness, and the deep denial of our layered, falsified, forbidden, and exoticized histories, which have meanwhile become far too deeply anchored. This theatrical tour de force, full of virtuosity, insight, and wisdom, but also of confusion and a persistent refusal to take responsibility, drags us along: we spin around, grasp at straws, and try to seize missed opportunities too late, while we become dismayed, hopeful, humiliated, and filled with revulsion, breathless and deeply moved. - Peter Sellars, American director and lecturer Art as Social and Moral Action UCLA