This is a performance which ends with the recitation of a death poem called New Year, written by the legendary poet Nazik el Malaika.
It 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 of rebellion. It is an homage to Nazik El Malaika and a swan song to the sultry, defiant, nocturnal joie de vivre of my Middle Eastern cities.
It is a performance for 20 to 30 people, which can be repeated several times in the course of an evening, with simple food made and served by the performer, accompanied by a series of drawings: landscapes, incantations, portraits of animals.
New Year 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 the last wish of Nazik el Malaika herself.
Nazik El Malaika was a world reknown Iraki poet who passed away in 2007. She wrote a lot about loneliness, the night, the liberation of Arab women and the dark tides that ravaged her life.
I use 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 arithmetics, voyeurism and bigotry.
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/
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