Born in the Loiret department in 1980, Mohamed El Khatib followed his parents’ advice and became a brilliant student in science and sociology. He discovered theater with Jan Lauwers’ work at the 2004 Festival of Avignon while interning at an institution that organizes theater campuses for disadvantaged children. He began making shows with his friends, founding the collective Zirlib in 2008, with which he wrote his first two plays, À l’abri de rien and Sheep, which immediately received very positive feedback.

Ironically, it is with Finir en beauté, a play about the death of his mother, in which he recorded their conversations while she was in the hospital, (where alone on stage he performs with a tape recorder) that his theatrical success in the world was officially decided. He arrived in Marseille, then at the Avignon Fringe in 2005, and from there began his long journey. He landed at FIT in 2018 with C’est la vie, an exploration of mourning at once tenuous and uncompromising (read more and watch the after-show talk).

Mohamed El Khatib continued his exploration of his family legacy with the film Renault 12 (2020), an initiatory “road movie” between Orleans and Tangier, and then with La Dispute, which brings together eight-year-old children who witness their parents’ separation. In 2019 he wrote L’Acteur fragile, a monologue for Éric Elmosnino, witnessing in his own way the paradox of the actor. With Boule à neige, in 2020, he invites historian Patrick Boucheron to the stage and, through the origin and history of snow globes, examines the relationship between kitsch, art history, and the desire to put the world “under a bell jar.”

Together with artist and filmmaker Valérie Mréjen, he created the LBO project and artistic research center, in the context of an EHPAD (an acronym for “Établissement d’hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes,” indicating a nursing home-like facility) inaugurated on June 24, 2022.

Thinking about Mohamed El Khatib’s work begs the question: is this documentary theater, a dramaturgy of reality? It is difficult to find words to accurately describe the singular art of this son of a Moroccan laborer and a cleaning woman. Where are the characters? Where is the fiction? Is it still theater? In any case, this is his theater. He works on the edge. There is no territory where he does not allow himself to enter. His work is destabilizing. It is not comforting: what he aims for is reconciliation.

< photo Louise Quignon

@ FIT

La vie secrète des vieux
2024 Edition
04.10 – 13.10

C’est la vie
2018 Edition
26.09 – 07.10