Water flows, carries, connects, erodes, remembers. MAAYII ميّي is a performance about what happens when we allow ourselves to flow across borders, histories, bodies, and wounds.
Participation is FREE but please REGISTER through the link below as seats are limited.
MAAYII ميّي is a practice of becoming porous. A reflection on opacity and transparency. On what we reveal, what we protect, and what we refuse to make legible. A space to reject subjugation and imagine forms of gender, racial, and class liberation beyond the structures that contain us. It is an ode to our peoples, to our geographies, our migrations, and our diasporas.
MAAYII ميّي is a shared word for water in both Congolese Lingala and the Arabic of Bilad al-Sham.
Drawing from anger, spells, love, resistance, confrontation, collective ritual, and repetition, MAAYII explores these forces as technologies and recipes for transnational solidarity and decolonial healing; a suggested translation of ancestral rituals into contemporary codes.
Kongi, Cheng, and Nancy create a space for collective processing – to seep through the fractures left by greed, colonization, displacement, and collective trauma.
Maayii brings together three multidisciplinary performance artists based in Europe with origins in soils of abundant sunlight; Kongi (Kinshasa, DRC), Cheng (Taiwan), and Nancy (Lebanon/Egypt).
Nancy Naser Al Deen (نانسي ناصر الدين ) is a Baalbeck-born multidisciplinary artist and scenographer based in Berlin. With a BS from Cairo & Masters from Berlin in Architecture & urbanism, Nancy’s collaboration-based practice investigates politics of space through navigating audiovisual archives, performance and installations.
Grounded in the body as a point of departure, Nancy’s practice situates itself in the voids rather than solids; and is deeply guided by transnational solidarities. Nancy is a Dabke dancer trained by Hayakel Baalbeck.

Mbunga Kongi, born in Kinshasa, the vibrant heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is a self-taught performance artist and filmmaker based in Brussels. Kongi’s work combines visual and corporeal languages, merging history and ritual-based practice to explore the role of Black womxn in African and Western societies.
Deeply inspired by historical figures of resistance, particularly the Mino warriors – fierce women who defied colonization – kongi’s art seeks to dismantle enduring prejudices and reclaim these often-overlooked narratives.
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Yang Cheng (楊誠) is a Taiwanese-born composer and experimental sound performer based in Berlin. Cheng's practice moves between electro-acoustic performance, body-based collaboration, and spatial audio research, built from gravity objects, electromagnetic fields, tape, radio noise, and field recording. With possibilities of input and output routing through body movement and digital/analog equipment, Cheng’s work researched the concealed questions within existing answers, composing listening decisions in places where sound also chooses to listen back.

Rooted in the rhythmic structures of Dabke, the folk dance of Bilad al-Sham, and informed by repetitions, loops, and movement vocabularies from Central Africa, along with experimental sounds from Taiwan; the work brings together voice, feedback soundscapes, and embodied ritual.
IN CONNECTION is HAUT’s international residency program, connecting artists based in Denmark with international contexts and international artists with the performing arts scene in Copenhagen. The residency is developed in collaboration with international partners – currently workspacebrussels (BE) and RAS (NO) – and tailored to the needs of each artist and project.
This residency is curated by our partners at workspacebrussels.