Event Detail

Gravebirth is a group audio-visual-movement improvisation through which we represent parallel stories confronting social oppression. Nasim Khorassani contributed a poetic text, Zendegi (life), by contemporary Iranian woman poet Erfan Nazar Ahari. This text illustrates an old woman giving birth in a grave. In a reversed life process, the poem shows offspring in combat, emerging from the death zone into that of life. Kosuke Matsuda offered the novel “Silence” by Syusaku Endo, a story of Japanese Christians’ religious oppression in the 17th century. Neither of these texts aims to transcribe history merely but instead attempts to define the real figure of humanity.

With these texts in hand, a wide-ranging collaboration ensued. We united the texts across their respective historical moments through sound, movement, and visuals, including light and projection. Through this, we aimed to make a hopeful and optimistic expression of solidarity with the Woman-Life-Freedom movement in Iran.

Gravebirth embeds performers and audience members in a sonic space consisting of sampled folksong, noise, drone, and silence. The space also contains suspended resonant pipes, standing in for the suspended political state of people fighting for freedom. During the course of the piece, the pipes are cut down, representing the fraught, dangerous, indeed deadly process of people freeing themselves in the course of political action. Gravebirth’s interrupted heavy silences represent God’s silence in response to the Japanese Christians’ prayers and the silence of the oppressed, particularly Iranian women, as they prepare to erupt into combat. Gravebirth aims to find one of the threads that could partially de(re)construct the enormous complexity of humanity, including emotional conflict and the sound of a surge in blood pressure when you, in your struggles, face the overbearing presence of silence.

Curated by: Kosuke Matsuda

More information: https://ideas.ucsd.edu/lamp-presents-gravebirth/