Sorour Darabi

” My throat wants to take your entire left hand, the one that was clubbed and wounded at the demonstration last Saturday. My throat is choking with hate. Slip your left hand on my vocal cords, touch my trembling feverish tongue, burning with words I still cannot pronounce… the words I left behind your back in silence.

Since my first piece, Farci.e (2016), my work has been developing the question of vulnerability. More precisely, my interest has been in considering the body as a vulnerable space where I can experiment new expressions of power. In Savusun (2018), I deconstructed norms relative to either masculine power (heroism) or feminine power (fertility). My intention was to reformulate certain binary concepts that shape our societies: man/woman; clean/dirty; vulgar/beautiful; ugliness/grace; pleasure/suffering. For instance, when I suck burning candles, their function is highjacked. They become objects of desire while also becoming sources of pain as the hot wax melts and burns. Yet, in this practice, I experience pleasure and invite the audience to question their own relationship to violence and gentleness, often perceived as opposites.

Expanding on this opposition (violence/gentleness), it seems important in my new project to begin with the concept of care. This concept will be informed by intimate experiences that are my own. In my daily life and in the minoritized communities that I am a part of, the notion of care is a militant term rooted in a constant socio-political conflict where everyone helps each other. Care is a way of life, a place of resistance, a way to be in touch with others. In order to present this perspective on stage, I will need to imagine an intimate setting between the ones who see and the ones being seen. A situation that would abolish the divide between stage and audience. A temporary zone that would protect, but that would also require being protected and upheld.

My practice of writing, which is the starting point of this creative process, is also a means to create choreographic scores. The language I wish to share is situated somewhere between my mother tongue, Farsi, and my second language, French. The reappropriation of a language that is not my own echoes with the reappropriation of gestures. This choreographic and textual language allows me to overturn power, identities, assignations. It helps me shape in-between zones, porous zones, between private and public, between collective and individual. Writing also enables me to assemble different emotional modalities and bring in humor, which I am particularly committed to in my work. Absurdity, distortion, humor will generate situations on stage as we go across layers and subtleties of care.

The red of your tongue on the red of my skin, lick (or caress) my wounds with words that fall from your tongue and fill the void of what tears me. As if it were the only graspable thing that I grasp in this world; your skin, the skin of your tongue, the tongue of your skin, your tongue.”

Sorour Darabi, February 2019