Habib Ben Tanfous

The Brussels artist Habib Ben Tanfous is 31 years old. A dancer, choreographer, and actor, his career began early thanks to hip-hop. At 15, he devoted a large part of his time to dancing and participating in competitions that took him all the way to New York.

2019 marked a turning point. Habib Ben Tanfous, who never stopped dancing, was selected by the training/creation program "tremplin hip hop #3", through which he created Orchestre vide, a piece for six performers, combining hip-hop and karaoke. For this work - presented in Mons, Brussels, and Liège - he resorted to the hybridity of genres, proposing a singular and composite form, reflecting the complexity of affiliations and individual narratives. At the same time, he began the one-year course "Dance and Choreographic Practices" at Charleroi Dance and familiarized himself with documentary approaches.

Between 2019 and 2022, he extended his reflections on identity, masculinity, colonial, racial, and patriarchal dominations by multiplying collaborations: he acted in Ether/after by Armel Roussel, Laboratoire Poison by Adeline Rosenstein, Phèdre by Pauline D'Ollone and danced in Débandade by Olivia Grandville. At the same time on the screens, he starred alongside Harpo Guit and Maximilien Delmelle, the memorable trio of the film Fils de Plouc.

Rich with these experiences, Habib Ben Tanfous is now working on his new project, Ici je lègue ce qui ne m’appartient pas, a solo whose premiere is scheduled for February 2023 in Brussels. Through numerous songs and visual archives - his family loves taking photos - he studies the postures of his parents, cousins, ancestors, tracing what partly, fully, or not at all constitutes him. A documentary, choreographic, and vocal research, whose resonances are rooted in the present since, as of July 2021, Habib Ben Tanfous is also a father.

In parallel, and always in search of novelty, he applies with the members of RAVIE for the direction of the Théâtre de la Vie in Saint-Josse. They are chosen to lead this theater from January 2023, a first for a collective in French-speaking Belgium.

Biography by Hanna El Fakir