There is no East,
There may never be a Sun
Laila Malik

Sun Eaters is a contemporary folk dance for our times, steeped in the viscous darkness hidden in ancient dances.

What happens when folk culture and folk dance are used to embrace the darkness of our era? Folk dance is capable of embracing long, epic, slow cycles of violence, making us capable of feeling them within the span of a performance. Folk dance is a collective ruin – a divided, collective memory. Sun Eaters is an attempt to portray what kind of folklore and folk dance could belong to our current political landscape. Dark folk dance is alive, exhumed, incarnate, waving back at us.

Sun Eaters is inspired by petro-magic realism, horror poetry and the tradition of revenge dances, mad shepherd dances, diseased god dances, Sun Eaters.

The piece uses sources from doom metal, pre-Islamic iconography, Levantine maqams, west asian death poetry, and cursed Norwegian tunes. It twists and betrays what it summons, and rekindles with the cruelty of folk to incarnate its deadly, seductive smile.


Sources:
Sun Eaters is based on Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani, associating pre-islamic iconography to analyze our political landscape, the studies of mesopotamian rituals concerning snakes, the cult of Pazuzu, the horror poetry of Aase Berg, the mythical poems of Laila Malik, the description of bodies in Hassan Blasim’s novels, the movie The House is Black by Forough Farrokhzad, and living documentation of exalted folk dances from Norway, Brittany and West Asia (Iran and Palestine).