Erwin Jans | "The performative truth of Chokri Ben Chikha - For theatre maker Chokri Ben Chikha, the personal is political and vice versa. He blends biography and imagination, current affairs and history, analysis and provocation, drawing on every possible theatrical device. This diversity of perspectives, parallels and comparisons forms his artistic method for arriving at the truth. For that is what matters most to him."
War correspondent in a dramatic context
30/12/2024 | Source theaterkrant.nl
When I meet Chokri Ben Chikha for an interview in late November, he has only just returned from Tunisia. The country is going through a turbulent period politically. On 1 August 2024, human rights activist and lawyer Sihem Bensedrine was arrested. In 2014, following the Tunisian revolution – the start of the Arab Spring (2011) – she was appointed chair of the Instance Vérité et Dignité, a truth commission tasked with investigating human rights violations between 1955 and 2013, under the regimes of Presidents Bourguiba and Ben Ali. Bensedrine presented a 2,000-page document in which she gave a voice not only to left-wing activists but also to fundamentalists, both groups being victims of human rights violations. This was poorly received by many secularists, and the work of Bensedrine and the Instance Vérité et Dignité became highly polarised.
In recent years, Ben Chikha has shown a particular interest in the practice and form of this truth commission, as an attempt to arrive at a polyphonic and socially endorsed truth. He has even developed an artistic variation on it. His Truth Commission on the Dutch colonial past (2023) was selected by the Theatre Festival, and interest in this unique combination of political ritual, theatre and documentary is also growing abroad. This approach is characteristic of the commitment that Ben Chikha, first with Union Suspecte and later with Action Zoo Humain, has shown in his theatre productions for three decades, with the colonial legacy, the history of migration and multicultural coexistence forming the core of his work.
He seeks out the tensions and conflicts of his time and places himself right at the heart of them: ‘As a historian, I am fascinated by broader patterns, such as the persistence of colonial frameworks and narratives in contemporary political discourse and representations of the ‘other’ on the one hand, and in everyday interactions between people on the other’.