AhmadBaba أحمد بابا
Multidisciplinary Performance Art 
Dance & movement therapy
Embodied Practices

Speaking in Tongues is a collaborative project born from the encounter between Ahmad Baba (Lebanon), Romane Piffaut (France), Clara-Marie Müller (Germany), Dominique Tegho (Lebanon), within the framework of an invitation to the Telescope Beirut program. We are four artists from France, Lebanon, and Germany, based between Berlin, Lyon and Montpellier. Our practices span dance, voice, performance, and visual arts.

Over the course of an intense week of collaborative work in Beirut, we experienced both the depth and misalignment in the process inherent to any multilingual, intercultural collective process. This experience sparked in us the desire to delve into the friction between bodies, languages, and divergent histories, not in search of an illusory unity, but to fully inhabit this dissonance as a fertile ground for creation and connection.

 

In a world where borders close, nationalist discourses gain ground, and identities are expected to be legible, we choose dissonance, non-translation, and instability, as a way to resist uniformity. Speaking in Tongues is an interdisciplinary, and participatory performance project that explores language beyond the cartesian understanding as primarily verbal. Rather than aligning around a common vocabulary, we build choreographic systems that let confusion and misunderstanding drive the work. Text is spoken, misheard, and repeated. Movements are misinterpreted and mistranslated. Instructions are shared between bodies that don’t speak the same language. Can we build connections from what escapes meaning? 

 

Speaking in Tongues is born from the liminality between understanding and misunderstanding. Our languages, our gestures, our rhythms do not always resonate with each other. And yet, something circulates between us. What if this something - woven from misunderstandings, imprecise resonances, and untranslated fragments - is not an obstacle, but a material to explore? How can we coexist without resemblance, and without having a common language? 

Speaking in Tongues draws inspiration from glossolalia: that transcendent moment when bodies unexpectedly speak in languages they do not understand. We are inspired by this phenomenon, and want to explore that gap where meaning slips away, and disorder takes over, with the aim to allow other ways of communication to emerge: through the body, sensation, gestures, and emotional affect.

Moved by our different geographical origins and artistic languages, in this project we want to develop what emerged from our first residency in September 2025 in Tanzfabrik Berlin Bühne - in which dramaturg Manolis Tsipos (Greece) accompanied us. We experimented with dance as language, the tongue as an organ and metaphor with AI and video, and voice as sound and meaning through the use of the loop machine. Moreover, we also devised text, revisited biblical narratives (namely that of the tower of Babel and the Pentecost), through the exchange of our individual practices. 

During the AV residency we want to continue working with the aforementioned elements, towards the creation of a participatory performance. 

In the development of this new work, we want to offer a living space where misunderstanding is not failure, but material to invent new forms of presence, attention, and solidarity. We perceive the multiplicity of language as a relational task: for this we want to explore how to engage the audience in the performance, for example through performative interventions.

 

Language, its meaning and multiple manifestations, lies at the core of our collaborative work. Never neutral, it carries memory, power, and control. It shapes our accents, our bodies, and identities. It becomes a terrain where we insist on staying in the gap, while dancing, sweating, speaking, and whispering. Speaking in Tongues is a performance where those who gather choreograph a new language weaved through threads of  (mis)understanding.