Mercenary
In 2022, Qatar will stage one of the biggest spectacles the world has ever seen: the FIFA World Cup. It's a phenomenon shrouded with hype even in its construction and, as the huge stadiums emerge from the sandy terrain, so do the stories of mass exploitation of a diverse migrant workforce.
Overview
Travelling across Qatar, Nepal and Sri Lanka, performance-maker and footballer Ahilan Ratnamohan expected to come face to face with the reality of what it takes to build our global World Cup dreams. Through interviews with the workers themselves, he glimpsed behind the Western media headlines and into the lives of those on the ground, discovering that much like the beautiful game itself, the truth is often a fallacy.
Mercenary is a collaboration between Ahilan Ratnamohan, a Sri Lankan-Australian footballer-artists, and Mutamassik, an Egyptian-Italian-American musician. The performance features Ratnamohan's distinctive football-dance movement seen in his LIFT 2014 production, Michael Essien, I Want To Play As You..., fused with Mutamassik's trademark first-generation, punk jaw, electronic pan-African derivatives.
Commissioned by LIFT. Presented by LIFT and Battersea Arts Centre.
Image credit: Andreas Begert/Alamy Live News.
Critic reviews
Effective but occasionally obscure football-based dance piece about Qatar 2022’s migrant workforce
The darker side to the World Cup is explored in Ahil Ratnamohan's dance-theatre production
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