Sometimes a good story needs to be told, not just imagined.

Some art needs a story. Then a canvas on the wall with the caption 'Untitled' is not enough. The performance 'Laaroussa' (Bride) by French-Tunisian brother and sister Selma and Soufiane Ouissi falls into that category. As extraordinary as their physical presence on a dark stage is, without explanations beforehand and a Q&A afterwards, it all says precious little.

Is that bad?

'Yes', because that story surrounding this 'performance' is too beautiful not to be heard, and 'yes', because without that explanation, the performance continues to fit into the image of hermetically sealed art that moves away from the audience. 'No', because the performance mostly takes place within the protected environment of an audience and a theatre that usually automatically bothers to gather background information already.

I myself belong to the category that prefers the artwork to automatically raise all relevant questions, inviting me to interpret what is on offer. I like to be told stories. I got the story here beforehand in an interview with Selma and Soufiane. And that story is special. Selma tells how she saw a sculpture in a Parisian gallery that she recognised from her native Tunisia. Enquiries revealed that the price asked for it by the French art trade was hundreds of times higher than the price the makers got for it. She thought this was unfair.

Development project

Together with her brother, with whom she had formed a dance-art duo for several years, she set out to investigate. They found dozens of women in the region where the figurines came from, all making pottery using the same techniques. There was hardly any contact between them: the women lived in hamlets miles apart. At best, there was hatred and envy, created by traders who talked prices down further in price negotiations, playing the women off against each other.

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As movement artists, Selma and Soufiane were impressed by the women's technique and made their performance about it. To give it context, a film crew was also flown in, and to streamline that again, the women were put in touch with each other. Thus, out of their artist curiosity, a development project was born. The women now work together, help each other, and also now manage to get a higher price for their work.

Arab Spring

All's well that ends well, you might say: were it not for the fact that the Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia, did not mean spring at all for this art project. Fundamentalism is also on the rise in Tunisia. Fighters are hiding in the mountainous area where women live and work. And some women have already been threatened for making not only dishes and plates, but also dolls. After all, depicting people is taboo in fundamentalist Islam.

This has suddenly put a tradition, whose formal language harks back to the Carthaginians 2,500 years ago, at risk.

So you will not get this story from the performance itself. It consists of extreme close-ups, beautifully filmed in super HD quality, of the women giving each other a face massage, of clay, of movement. In front of that projection screen are the two performers, and we see in string light highlighted first their backs, and then their hands moving, in a stylised version of the women's movements on the screen. Around them on papers the movements recorded in dance hieroglyphs. However aesthetically pleasing, a real connection is not established between the movements of the two artists and the screen behind them. To pull that off, you really need the story after all.

That should be an integral part of the show. But many theatres think that's a bad idea. And that, in turn, I think is a bad idea.

What do you think? Does art sometimes need better explanation? Let us know in the comments!