LAUNDRY OF LEGENDS
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Kaveh Akbar
Choreography, concept, scenography, light & sound design: Jassem Hindi
Dance: Clara Furey, Simon Portigal & Justing De Luna
Laundry of Legends II is based on a death poem written by Etel Adnan titled The Arab Apocalypse. As a constellation around this black star of a poem, el Hindi has added allies, poems that are in friendship and vibration with this text: poems by Aase Berg, Kaveh Akbar and CA Conrad.
Death poetry is a special kind of incarnated political healing; it tell us where to look for a pharmacy – at the way children dance, or how corpses still retain invisible movements, or when bodies are crouching, shaking, bent in threatening postures.
These particular texts, when transformed by dancing bodies, become oracle making, lyrical resurrections, death fueled time-machines. Death poems emerge when there is a gathering. They start in the body, and reassemble themselves within us in fragments.
el Hindi’s work is baroque, cruel, and cosmological. It offers hospitality, companionship, by giving concrete indications on how to surrender, how to betray death, how to be playful with absence.
World Premiere May 17, 2023 at the MAI in Montreal, Canada
Laundry of Legends II is a commission for Jassem Hindi by the MAI - an institution advocating for, and in support of the development, creation, presentation and promotion of intercultural arts
Funded by:
Canada Council for the Arts
with the support of Kulturdirektoratet (Norwegian Arts Council - SKS Arbeidstipend)
