As a teenager in 1970s Tunis, Latifa Khamessi used to sneak out to discos. Her parents didn’t approve. One time they punished her by shaving her hair off, but Khamessi went to her hairdresser and got a wig. Then they hid her dresses, so she wore one of her brother’s shirts instead. She had a rebellious spirit, but mostly Khamessi just loved to dance, releasing her energy and frustrations on the dancefloor. “It was a moment of transformation,” she says. Even when she was pregnant with her first son, her husband would take her out dancing. She dreamed of being a dancer, but it wasn’t a viable or respectable career.
Now, 65-year-old Khamessi has finally made it to the stage with her son Mohamed Toukabri – the one who went to discos in utero and became a professional dancer. He tells people he got the bug after watching breakers dance to hip-hop outside Tunis’s railway station, but now he realises “it was all there all along, transmitted to me somehow”.
Toukabri studied in Brussels then danced with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. His first solo work, The Upside Down Man, examined his personal experience as an immigrant, and his new show, The Power (of) the Fragile, is a second chapter of that story in the shape of a duet for him and his mum.
On video call, the pair sit side by side, she in baseball cap, smoking (like a real old-school dancer), he with warm smile and gentle presence, long hair tied back, translating for her. The idea came from Toukabri wanting to pay tribute to his own mother, and all the parents who have sacrificed their “time, energy, youth and dreams” for the younger generation.
Troubled by the world’s complexity and violence, and its demands for him to define his identity, Toukabri was also looking for a safe space, which led him back to his mother (although he recognises that’s not everybody’s experience with their parents). “I refer to my mother as my first country,” he says, “as a way to reject the idea of nationalism. The womb as a first country, the mother as a land and the act of giving birth as an act of immigration. So you can say we are all immigrants.”
When they started work in the studio, Toukabri, now 32, had been in Europe for 15 years, with only brief visits home. Suddenly mother and son were spending three months living and working together. “It was intense,” says Toukabri. “We also realised that we had both grown up, but we didn’t know each other.” There were natural hierarchies to navigate, between parent and child, and professional and non-professional dancer. “It was physically very demanding for me,” says Khamessi of the rehearsal process. “There was fear that I would not be on the level to deliver. I was always questioning myself.”
“But she managed to transform that fear, the fragility of someone her age, into a strength,” says Toukabri, admiringly. “To throw herself into it, and that’s because of the love and the passion for dance that was still inside her.”
In The Power (of) the Fragile the pair dance, they talk, hold and carry each other, there is physical and emotional intimacy. Toukabri is interested in the personal and the universal; they are being their authentic selves, but “somehow we become a mirror to whoever comes to see us”. He’s found that every person sees something different, probably depending on their own family relationships.
When it came to the first performance, Khamessi was gripped with shyness and nerves. “But now I look forward to going on stage. I can look at people comfortably and make jokes with them, it’s like I’m dancing at home,” she says. She has been surprised how well the audiences have responded to her. “I have a sense of happiness and of pride as well.”
Mother and son are obviously very close. Does Khamessi have any parenting advice? “Become the child’s friend,” Toukabri translates for her. “That way he can feel close and you can build trust, be transparent with each other. The child will not be afraid to come to you and tell you their secrets, otherwise they will do things behind your back.” Like run off to banned discos, presumably. But she also advises to “look from afar, not invade their personal space” or they will push to escape.
It seems to have worked for this family. When Toukabri first became interested in dance, his parents feared it wasn’t something he could make a career from. “But when they saw that I was really committed, they gave me the space to do what I wanted to do, not project their own fears on their child,” says Toukabri. And in letting Toukabri follow his dreams, Khamessi fulfilled hers, too.
The Power (of) the Fragile is part of Shubbak festival at Battersea Arts Centre, London, 27-29 June, and at the Lowry, Salford, 1 July
