About
dance theater that moves the soul
Project Zahira creates sensorial dance theater productions. The company is based out of Amsterdam and works project by project. Artistic director Zahira Mous's vision for the company is to allow all parties involved in the creation of a performance to be touched by the process. Project Zahira creates socially engaged works and honors the sacred feminine, functioning from the modality of women empowered leadership, creating with compassion and inviting the soul into the creative process. Performances engage the audience to be pulled into an interpersonal experience. In Reclaiming the Goddess we show the process of women finding their power and creating a supportive sisterhood, including live cello; the formerly forbidden instrument for girls & women to play. In THE RITE, we fight femicide ... something that is not nearly enough spoken about, even though men murder women daily... Currently, in the process of writing a new work. Stay tuned.
Our Story
Project Zahira was founded with the desire to bring women together in a supportive environment in the arts, pioneering compassionate leadership in dance and creating deeply meaningful works in the realm of what we call 'spiritual dance theater,' performances that move the soul.
Artistic director and choreographer Zahira Mous started her professional choreography career in 2006 in the Netherlands with her graduation work entitled V - after which she lived in the United States for five years to attend graduate school for a Master of Fine Arts in Dance and and Women's & Gender Studies during which she created various choreographic as well as written pieces, with her thesis entitled "Feminist Contemporary Choreography: Addressing Gender-Bias in Society".
In 2013, Zahira moved to Amsterdam and launched the Young Makers Platform (YMP) and curated two performance festivals at Amsterdam Roest. In that festival, she had invited a couple of other woman makers, singer and theater maker Jildou Kroes and performance artist Lindsey Allgood. Lindsey brought her concept Things that belong in Wombs, which she co-created and performed with Zahira. Additionally, Vacuum (2010) and Twofold (2013) were performed. Vacuum is about the psyche of a woman and showcases all the expectations that fall on her. Twofold explores our public and personal identities and the hidden parts in between. Twofold was co-created with Natasja Bode, Helena Lopez, Theresa Thonfors, and Lisa Ball. By 2015, Zahira met Merel Cornet and Wies Berkhout with whom she co-created De Doos, performed at the YMP festival that year. The exploration of De Doos turned into Who am I without my story? when we asked Maria Kuchowicz to join the cast in 2017.
Project Zahira gained her name officially when the three of them went on tour with Who am I without my story? to Greece for the 50th World Congress of Dance Research in Athens, Greece in 2017. By the end of the year the artistic team started research for Reclaiming the Goddess with Merel Cornet, Maria Kuchowicz, Ana Portela, and Djahan Manuela Mazhari Perez, with a 'work in progress' showing in 2018 at the Friese Dansdagen in Leeuwarden. This work kept evolving and so did the cast. In 2019, Reclaiming the Goddess premiered with Merel and Maria alongside Noa van Tichel, Jacqueline Back and Ivana Berkhout as our intern and cello player Laura Roura i Foixà with an incredible last performance in January of 2020 in Friesland, right before the pandemic hit.
It was a time of deep reflection on what it means to be an artist. And can one still be an artist when there's no more audience? No more theater? The answer was yes. The artist remains.
In February 2022, Zahira was invited for an arts residency in the south of Spain at JOYA-Air. She made a six week road trip through Europe, contemplating and creating and spent two weeks at the residency, working on material. In September of that year, Soul Famine, was launched; an absurdist tragicomic performance solo about depression - performed in a small art gallery that resembled the reception space in a funeral home; commemorating the death of joy.
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The yearning to create something big came from something small. Zahira wanted to create a duet with Ivana. And through various calls and brainstorm sessions it was decided to make a piece about: violence against women - to bring awareness to this topic.
THE RITE is a dance theater production inspired by the 1913 Nijinsky ballet Le Sacre du Printemps and Pina Bausch's The Rite of Spring (1975). In THE RITE (2023), we placing its original content (men sacrificing a virgin so that spring can come again) in the contemporary context of femicide and the role of the patriarchy in controlling women's bodies, livelihoods, and lives.
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THE RITE was restaged in March 2025 in collaboration with the City of Amsterdam for training purposes for professionals who work with perpetrators and victims, their children and family members.
