BREAD  is a choreographic research rooted in the story of my mother, who spent nearly forty years making and selling bread in El Kef, northern Tunisia, to support her family. Rather than telling the story of one woman alone, I use her experience as a starting point to look at bread as a deeply political and social matter: a basic necessity, a form of labour, a source of dignity, and a recurring symbol of economic and political struggle in Tunisia.

My research brings together dance, sound and spoken word. I return to my hometown and reconnect with my mother and other women who make bread, observing their hands, gestures, rhythms, songs and ways of working. These encounters allow me to reconnect with a bodily and familial memory, while questioning how everyday gestures are transmitted and how they can become choreographic material.

The creation also draws on traditional Tunisian dances and songs, particularly forms associated with women’s gatherings and celebrations. Rather than reproducing these forms literally, I re-examine their movements, rhythms and physical principles through my contemporary practice. The circular movements, undulations, movements of the pelvis and repetitive gestures involved in making bread resonate with my own bodily memory of Tunisian dance.

Through this dialogue between personal memory, traditional practices and the political history of bread, I explore the body as an archive and dance as a way of carrying, transforming and transmitting memory. The work is ultimately about labour, dignity and inheritance, centred on the bodies and knowledge of women whose work has often remained unseen.