Flaming creatures
Latifa Laâbissi
In 2026, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting Latifa Laâbissi for her new creation, Flaming creatures.
They are not meeting for the first time.
They recognize each other from a memory older than themselves.
Something precedes them: an invisible thread, woven through Amazigh lands, where stories still circulate between bodies, voices and dances.
This culture, while marginalized, endures—rich and foundational, carried through matriarchal lineages and subterranean forms of transmission. A living, organic memory that permeates time.
Out of this space the piece emerges.
Latifa Laâbissi and Walid Ben Selim do not seek to locate an origin, but to channel a transformative force through music and dance.
Ancient songs surface. Elusive figures emerge, never fully revealed, never fully grasped. Voices pass through bodies, carrying fragments of time, flashes of memory, buried resonances.
Gesture arises—unstable, necessary—at the threshold of ritual and the unknown.
Presences take shape: Majdoub (the one drawn toward the unknown), Lbouhaliya (the sacred madwoman), LMeskoun (the possessed).
Figures from the margins, of excess or rupture, they shift frameworks, unsettle identities and open spaces where new narratives can emerge.
The space itself becomes part of this passage. Nadia Lauro’s installation is an organism of thread and material, inscribed with traces—an oracle between memory, fiction and hallucination.
Flaming Creatures thus becomes a liminal space.
A place where Amazigh inheritances are reactivated as living forces through dance and song, where marginalized figures cease to be relegated and instead emerge as forces of appearance and transformation.
What was once peripheral takes center stage.
An ode to madness, to states of rupture, to unruly forces.
A crossing—toward other forms of presence, other ways of being in the world.
A celebration of the margins.
Latifa Laâbissi
In 2026, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting Latifa Laâbissi for her upcoming creation, Flaming Creatures.
