Reflection of Basma Arfaoui :

The idea of creating this project immersed following a number of existential questions and philosophical thoughts that are constantly running through my head... Being an anti-conformist anti-system, and very often against the common thought, it is quite naturally that I asked myself several questions about the situation we are currently living: What is the impact of this virus on us human beings? And how, through a dance, I can encourage a spiritual reflection on what is happening.

My reflection is about the human condition, the constraint to go out, but the freedom to travel within oneself, inside oneself, our body is our temple, a return to oneself is essential, to anchor oneself in a consumer society where man has become like a robot, always on the lookout for appearance, for consumption but cut off from its very nature, its spiritual roots, and which kills the nature in which it lives.

How can we rebuild a "social" link with ourselves, to be inside when we can't be outside... In times of "virus", it's time to talk about the virus of the single thought... Not to think like everyone else, wouldn't it also be a disease of the mind in the eyes of the supporters of the single thought, a virus often described as a spirit of contradiction? *Dance is the art of unifying body and mind, reconciling intention and action, and integrating space and time. "For me, it is the best way to express my thoughts poetically without words. In this context, how to open up a space of freedom in a situation of constraint(s)? How can we contradict the idea that the more constraints there are, the less freedom there is?

Biography of Basma Arfaoui :

Basma Arfaoui, born in Tunisia and grew up in France, is an artist, multidisciplinary and with a very atypical background, but also Life Coach, Naturopath, Massage Therapist and Energy Therapist.

Passionate and in love with dance since she was very young, she started to dance oriental dance, following Egyptian films with her mother, while she lived in France, but also immersed in Congolese musical rhythms, having spent her first two years of life in Congo. Later around the age of 12, she started to take some oriental dance classes, at the age of 16, she moved to Senegal, it was love at first sight, she discovered African dances and followed some workshops of different other dance styles, then had her first experience as a choreographer's assistant in high school where she taught girls oriental dance steps to dance on RNB. Then she is forced to leave dance aside, because of the vagaries of life and family.

After obtaining her baccalaureate, she returned to her native country where she studied at the Faculty of International Commerce, then at the Faculty of Economic and Social Management with a specialization in Psychology, always anxious to understand the workings of the mind and to be closer to others. She then continued with a BTS in Massage Therapy and Aesthetic Care, in parallel with training in Dance Therapy.

En 2010, Elle enseigne la danse orientale et utilise la danse comme outil thérapeutique auprès des femmes. 

Between 2011 and 2018, she keeps her dream of being a great dancer in her heart, her father being against it, she makes another career and at the same time feeds her thirst for art by doing plastic art, painting, music, photography by reading a lot, and by attending dance workshops from time to time.

At the end of 2018, an actor spots her and advises her to take acting lessons, at the same time she follows a training course as a life coach, then it's the trigger, her love for the stage is confirmed, she undertakes the risk of letting go of everything to get out of her comfort zone and stop her career facing the consequences of this to follow her childhood dream. So she takes the decision to make her assets evolve, she starts with contemporary dance classes, very quickly she locks herself in "her bubble" and continues with other dance classes, such as classical dance, night and day even in line, theoretical and practical to feed her thirst for dance, then she flies away to attend international workshops of traditional African dance and contemporary dance including a workshop and an intensive and academic training in the famous "ECOLES DES SABLES" and has the Acogny technique, She then continues with Qiqong lessons, Persian dances, tango and Tunisian folk dances, with the National troupe with which she is still training. She says she is too much in love with dance and likes to enrich her gestural vocabulary by drawing from different styles.

Currently, Basma is working on her own technique of fusion between African dances, oriental dance and Berber dances and on her solo, her artistic approach is very spiritual, and in the creation of the new, she says "not to like to do like the others" she relies on her multidisciplinary knowledge and is based on the treatment of the body, of the spirit and the emotions, she also draws inspiration from the sacred rituals of the world as well as from Sufism, while keeping a basic movement inspired by oriental dances. In a contemporary approach to dance, she explores the diversity of cultural interpretations of fundamental dance steps, but also draws inspiration from the "Butoh" and expressionist movement.

This work allows her to envisage a new approach to the dynamics of movement, gesture and space management. The work of elevation is present and at the same time enriched by the rootedness proposed by the dances of the world.

His choreographic research is elaborated from improvisations in fusion with music. Through dances of a great interiority while preserving the requirement of a technicality of the dance, she likes to combine movements of distant origins and yet astonishingly compatible on the aesthetic level.