Laundry of Legends I

Laundry of Legends is the recitation of a death poem accompanied by a series of drawings: landscapes, incantations, portraits of animals.
It is an homage to the late oracle poet Nazik El Malaika, and a swan song to the sultry, defiant, nocturnal joie de vivre of my Middle East.

A project curated by Barbara Raes and HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Funded within the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. It has been made in Berlin (HAU), Tehran (Fadjr), and soon Brussels (KAI).
Interview by Dr. Elisabeth Nehring about the work can be found here: https://www.theaterderzeit.de/buch/unacknowledged_loss/

Excerpt:
My work around death in the Arab world is not about some inalienable identity. Quite the opposite. I want to produce something that can be used by whoever. Herein lies the necessity: to reclaim the playfulness and heuristic power of orality. 
I use here here Malaika’s provocative claim to a different type of relation to death, as a place of gathering and sharing, rather than a horrifying moment reduced and simplified to gore arithmetic, voyeurism and bigotry.

Laundry of Legends is about the conditions of production of transmission. It is to be done from person to person. It is a gift performance, the passing of a death poem from one person to another. The sharing of this poem is a physical, discursive and emotional gesture - and incidentally an attempt to fulfill a death bed promise. This can only be done physically.

The poem is called New Year, and was written by Nazik El Malaika, an Iraki poet who passed away in 2007. Her poem is about the quality of death that one can hope for. It is a desperate and dark poem and at the same time a courageous enraged cry. Nazik was a revolutionary poet, writing a lot about death, the liberation of Arab women and the dark tides that ravaged her life.