I have false memories about real I-refute-you-thus things.
I mention this because dance creator Mohamed Issaoui wrote a 20-minute dance performance he calls Ommi Sissi, recalling a North African folk tale. I saw it just the other day at Atelier de Paris, as part of the June Events 2025 festival. Mohamed Issaoui has one of the most expressive bodies I have ever seen.
After Ommi Sissi it took me a while to catch up my wits again.
I know from bitterest experience that everybody I’ve ever run into has false memories, too. Between the fact of experience (or perception), the space/time that passes between experience and use of memory there’s a great deal that goes on.
Then again, perhaps personal experience bears an uncertain, not false, relationship with the-refuted-thus-things and memories are not false but just different.
There’s surely that. I don’t hear certain sounds that others hear, but I hear some sounds where others hear nothing. Karine, my partner, and I do not see the same color shades. I may see blue where she sees green. But never white where she sees black or vice versa. We’re agreed there.
My eldest brother, Steve, died of AIDS in Spring 1989. He drowned in the Potomac river. His car flew off a bridge at very excessive speed. Family records show a taste for reckless driving among siblings and parents. I’ve myself racked up thousands in fines over the years, most spectacularly in what I shall always remember as The Traversée der Schweiz, when I thought somebody else would pick up the tabs. I was wrong about that. I speed because I hate driving and want to get the trip over with.
Steve kicked out the window to get out of the car that had flown into the river and rolled over. He was probably unsteady on his feet when he sprang out the broken window and on to the surface. My brothers and I agreed that he must’ve been too weak and too shaken to wade to shore in the Potomac’s lazy current. He must’ve fallen and then let exhaustion lead him to watery death.
I just learned for the first time from The Washington Post archives that Steve’s body was found on the shore. And learned also that he died not Spring 1989 but in October 1990. The autopsy – I still have the papers somewhere – show that Steve had several large tumors in his brain. These tumors were killing him well before the cops found his corpse on the river bank.
In those days before his death we talked on the phone frequently. I even made it my business to make a personal visit at least once. I learned he had AIDS from a frightening dream of The Iron Buddha. I woke up, called Steve up, asked him as soon as he picked up. He confessed, though it were no crime to be sick; it was ma wanted to hide it.
I remember that he was very worried for his partner, who was HIV positive, would have to die alone, he said. He didn’t think the boyfriend would be able to stay sane – my eldest brother put great store in remaining rational, cool and collected at all times. He was very proud of his combat experience in Vietnam, which was intense.
Choreographer and performer Mohammed Issaoui is from Tunis. He now works in France. The Ommi Sissiperformance has this little story line: some time in the late teens or 20s, I expect, a sex friend gets diagnosed with HIV. Mohammed, Mo, was there for the diagnosis and the medical person in attendance tells him he, Mo, ought to do the test, too. And, after a while, Mo decides to get his own positive test, and get his own positive diagnosis, too, ‘though he’s alone with the medical person for it.
The “Ommi Sissi” of the performance title is the name of a mother with a daughter. Ommi Sissi’s story is that, one day, she finds a silver coin and buys her daughter a nice piece of fresh fish for a treat. When she returns from the fish market she puts the fish on the kitchen table. She goes back to scrubbing her house.
The neighbor’s cat comes by to borrow a knife. Because she’s busy, Ommi Sissi sends it into the kitchen to fetch the knife itself. The cat sees the fish, can’t resist and eats it. The daughter comes home, not find the fish and she and her mother are sad. When Ommi Sissi realizes what’s happened, she cuts off that cat’s tail. She tells the cat she’ll restore its tail if it gets some butter from a shop. This is not a straightforward task.
To get the butter, the cat has to get milk to churn it. It then comes to find out that it has to find a cow to get milk. Then it has get a meadow for the cow to graze. Then the meadow has to have grass. Grass needs water. And time. The cat finally brings back the butter.
As promised, Ommi Sissi restores the cat's tail.
As he moves in space, Mohammed Issaoui’s hip is a flywheel.
The flywheel slips around him like a planet around the sun. I keep feeling that the planet will break out and fly off as it reaches its aphelion on the oblique plane. Fly into some other belt of transmission, just find another orbit, even change into some other figure. It goes on to the end just as it began.
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I saw "Ommi Sissi" (2024), a solo dance performance created by Mohamed Issaoui in collaboration with the choreographer and performer Selim Ben Safia, in the rehearsal studio at the Atelier de Paris CDCN, 3 June 2025, with sound by Houieda Hedfi as part of the June Events 2025 dance performance festival.
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Other artists on the June Events 2025 program
Click on the name to find out more: Habib Ben Tanfous, Julie Botet, Jeanne Brouaye, Puma Camillê, Gilles Clément et Christian Ubl, Victoria Côté Péléja, Rosalind Crisp, Florencia Demestri et Samuel Lefeuvre, Simon Feltz, Geisha Fontaine et Pierre Cottreau, Cassiel Gaube, Yan Giraldou et Amélie Malleroni, Linda Hayford, Rémy Héritier, , Marie-Caroline Hominal, Rebecca Journo, Wanjiru Kamuyu, Daniel Larrieu, Joanne Leighton, Candice Martel, Ikue Nakagawa, Alban Ovanessian, Dilo Paulo, Pierre Pontvianne, Manuel Roque, Nina Santes, Liz Santoro et Pierre Godard, Jéssica Teixeira, Vânia Vaneau, Louise Vanneste.
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