Deena Abdelwahed anchors ‘Magec / The Desert’ with striking music and sound design

Choreographer Radouan Mriziga’s new multidisciplinary stage project Magec / the Desert, which premiered this year, is receiving international attention, with Deena Abdelwahed providing its music and sound design.

Magec / the Desert investigates the world’s great deserts, from the Sahara to the steppes of Central Asia, as living landscapes governed by their own rhythms, systems and wisdom. The piece unfolds as a sensory and poetic meditation on nature’s grandeur, suggesting that these environments reveal themselves only when humanity approaches them with humility and space.

Performed by a cast of six dancers, the production combines music, text and movement inspired by indigenous cultures to question humanity’s deeply anthropocentric relationship with the world. Deena Abdelwahed’s music and sound design form a central pillar of this polyphonic creation, amplifying its immersive narrative. Her soundscape anchors the performance, transforming the stage into a sensory desert, weaving together atmospheric textures, rhythmic pulses and sonic references to landscape and memory.

Debuting in Belgium, the work has since continued its international trajectory with performances in France, Germany, Tunisia, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

The project forms the second instalment of Radouan Mriziga’s wider trilogy exploring the mountain, the desert and the sea as spaces of knowledge and embodied wisdom. The first chapter, Atlas / The Mountain, debuted in 2024, while Magec / the Desert continues this conceptual journey by approaching natural environments not merely as physical landscapes, but as living archives shaped by memory, cultural practice and ecological understanding. Within this trilogy, each terrain is treated as a site of transformation, offering alternative ways of perceiving time, belonging and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.