MWF: To Catch A Terrorist - Adham Hafez Company and HaRaKa Platform
Danscentrum Stockholm / Stockholm
“To Catch A Terrorist” is a work that looks at the disciplining of bodies, the formation of borders,
and the instrumentalization of fear. Based on court transcripts documenting early Arab and
Muslim naturalization cases, this production stages these documents for the first time, in
juxtaposition to newly collected interviews with Arab and Muslim citizens attempting to cross
borders, collapsing the historical distance between the past and today. While the impact of
violence maybe viscerally visible when we address crises of war, it is in the quotidian micro-
aggressions and daily violations of the humanness of a subject that we are reminded of
institutionalized violence; a violence that is selective in its scope of enactment. The production
looks at how the “performance” of law creates categories of being, tiers of citizenship, and
classes of humanity, and how empirical modes of propagating knowledge could feed into
political practices of body control. Through dark humor, data analysis, and inquiries that range
from interviews with travelers at borders to traces of exorcist rituals set to deconstructed
classical Arabic music, "To Catch A Terrorist" investigates vision planes and visibility in relationto the emergence of non-Western subjects in public discourse.
Originally commissioned for La Mama Moves Festival (NYC), To Catch A Terrorist is a production
of Adham Hafez Company, in partnership with La Mama ETC (NY), HaRaKa Platform (Cairo), and with the support of Kuchar&Co (EG/ US)