For AlUla Arts Festival 2025, Thikra: A Night of Remembrance intertwines dance, landscape and ancestral memory in a ritual of past and future.
On a cold January night in AlUla, under a magnificent canopy of stars, Thikra: A Night of Remembrance premiered to a small audience huddled under fur-lined farwas. Commissioned by Wadi al Fann as part of their pre-opening programme, the production is choreographed by Akram Khan with the music and soundscape composed by Aditya Prakash. Manal Al Dowayan, who will contribute one of Wadi al Fann’s five monumental commissions when it opens in late 2027, serves as visual director, designing all sets and costumes. For Thikra, she extends her sustained, multi-year engagement with the local community, collaborating with local artisans and Madrasat Addeera to create banners for the show’s opening procession, which were carried by 35 members of the local community.
Writ throughout Thikra is AlUla’s DNA. Landscape, ancient heritage, community, magic. All textiles employ traditional craft techniques and are dyed with natural pigments drawn from the surrounding landscape, while jewellery and makeup similarly draw from the area’s rich heritage, specifically the Nabataeans. Visitors sit on sadu carpets handwoven by women all over Saudi Arabia. Seen from above, the circular set design suggests the samra, as well as the region’s long history of gathering around a fire to share stories and poetry well into the night.
Then there’s the rocky sandstone landscape, inescapably a main character in anything on view there. The site of Thikra displayed it to magnificent effect, with judicious use of lighting casting mesmerising shadows onto the surrounding walls; at times I found myself watching the cliff faces more than the stage. Here too, the surroundings conspire with the work – and particularly the score – to create a sensorially overwhelming effect, the kind that exceeds language and leaves you grasping for appropriately bombastic descriptors, hollow as they may read.
The three-night premiere coincided with the month-long AlUla Arts Festival and included another Wadi Al Fann teaser of sorts. A James Turrell exhibition, with a handful of small works and some blown-up renders of his future commission, had the dubious energy of a movie trailer-meets-real estate sales office. Equally, a Maha Malluh exhibition featuring older photograms indexing Saudi’s material culture in its transformation from tradition to hypermodernity also fell flat in its outdoor installation, though I suspect it might read better at night. Much more compelling were a Danieh Al Saleh and Susanne Kriemann show at Athr and two daytime performances, one in response to Tarek Atoui’s Bayt Al Homs featuring Sandy Chamoun’s remarkable vocals, and an especially beautiful one from Sarah Brahim and Ugo Schiavi. The latter positioned performers on a hillside at a distance that de-emphasised the visual, asking attendees to listen to their breath and consider their own interior landscapes instead.
Especially exciting was the inaugural show at Abdulmohsen Binali’s experimental apartment gallery N.E.S.T, curated by Hafsa Al Khudairi and featuring works in progress. It was intimate and especially refreshing in a region where high production value tends to stand in for rigour. Highlights included Hayfa Algwaiz’s triptych of shrugged-off abayat and contractor-for-hire graffiti, and Bilal Allaf’s balletic video face-off with a robot dog.
If someone were to pen a Binyavanga Wainaina-style guide entitled How to write about AlUla, it would exhort you to mention its status as a crossroads. Fortuitously located among fertile oases, it grew up at the confluence of the east-west Silk Road and the north-south Incense Route and, with the advent of Islam, became an important stopping point on the overland pilgrimage route. Accordingly, the forthcoming Contemporary Art Museum in AlUla, developed in partnership with the Centre Pompidou, will be joined by the Museum of the Incense Road. AlUla is framed today as a crossroads of culture and a city at the crossroads between the ancient world and the modern.
This sense of cross-cultural exchange is felt in the multilingual choreography of Thikra, whose movements are grounded in the rhythmic Indian classical dance form of kathak but which also draws from contemporary dance. It is sweeping and emotionally charged, as well as quietly violent, with a narrative that unfolds in lyrical, affective pulses rather than linearly. Its major themes of collective memory, ancestral knowledge, female resilience and female rage resonate with AlDowayan’s practice, and characters seamlessly move between the past and future, as if through a portal.
In this respect Thikra is emblematic of a phenomenon I have come to call “Big Desert Art”, as typified by Desert X AlUla, Art d’Égypte, and the forthcoming Wadi Al Fann—monumental works, a stunning desert landscape, impressive vestiges of an ancient civilisation (or few), and a curious suturing of distant past and future that deftly elides the present. In the middle of the stage, a rock is inscribed with the work’s central sentiment, in the Lahyanite script: “Without a past, there is no future”. It is a masterclass in city branding, and no less moving for that. But viewed against the broader transformations in AlUla, Thikra reminds us that without a future, there is equally no past.
