LAUNDRY OF LEGENDS
Choreography, concept, scenography, music: Jassem Hindi
Dance: Clara Furey, Simon Portigal & Justing de Luna
Lights: Darah Mia
Commissioned by the MAI, Montreal with the support of the Norwegian Arts Council
How to dance during war times? What to dance in the face of extreme violence?
Laundry of Legends is based on the poem of Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse, written at the beginning of the Lebanese civil war, in the midst of the palestinian struggle. It is a baroque, cruel, and cosmological text, a death poem, laced with references to pre-islamic mythologies, an epic battle between a woman and the sun, a love letter to the healing powers of the night.
Death poetry is a special kind of incarnated political healing; it tells us where to look for our pharmakon – at the way children dance, or how corpses still retain invisible movements, or when bodies are crouching, shaking, bent in threatening postures.
This poem, when transformed by dancing bodies, become oracle making, lyrical resurrection, death fueled time-machine. The poem emerges when there is a gathering. It starts in the body, and reassembles itself within us in fragments.
Laundry of Legends is a dance piece showing us how to surrender, how to betray death, how to be playful with absence.
World Premiere May 17, 2023 at the MAI in Montreal, Canada
Performance: May 23, 24 2025 at Espace Libre - Festival Acces Asie, Montreal, Canada
Funded by:
Canada Council for the Arts
with the support of Kulturdirektoratet (Norwegian Arts Council - SKS Arbeidstipend)
