On the occasion of his return to the Romaeuropa Festival, Mohamed El Khatib brought the show to the stage with which he came to international attention. Finir en beauté is an intimate and personal plunge into the bond between mother and son, an irreverent and moving reflection on loss and mourning. With the style that belongs to his theatre, El Khatib stages the dialogue with his mother, her death, and the inner disintegration of a son, articulating a dramaturgy composed of excerpts from diaries, emails sent and received, voice mails, text messages, and fragments of conversations with his father. Through this emotional map, the director, alone on stage, presents an autobiographical tale that soon becomes a universal tale of our being children.
Author, director, filmmaker, and visual artist Mohamed El Khatib develops projects at the intersection of performance, literature, and cinema, creating encounters between art and those distanced from it. After Moi, Corinne Dadat, where a cleaning woman and a classical dancer compared their skills, he continued exploring the working class with STADIUM, bringing 58 supporters of Racing Club de Lens onto the stage. He also delved into the theme of divorced families through radio and cinema, and with historian Patrick Boucheron, he sketched a people’s history of art through a snow globe. Alongside his theatrical works, El Khatib develops visual research in collaboration with various artists. In Savoie, with Valérie Mréjen, he initiated the creation of the first art center in a nursing home; at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, he curated a sentimental exhibition involving precarious curators from the Abbé-Pierre Foundation and museum staff. At Mucem, he conceived the exhibition Renault 12, inspired by car trips from Franco-Maghrebi families. El Khatib is an associate artist at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, the Théâtre National de Bretagne, and the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles.
