Lashes came and cried a river… (sold out)

A ritualistic performance in which the interdependent relationship of grief and praise is central. 

What can we learn about loss from the ways textile envelops us in times of grief? 

What do we learn from extending our emotional and sensuous selves into materials surrounding us about world-making? 

In Lashes came and cried a river… Raoni Muzho Saleh aims to transform the stage into an incubation chamber, a fermentation womb that urges one’s sympathetic and visceral self into ‘hatching’. This moaning ritual dance is performed by one of Raoni’s drag characters: Lashes. Lashes belongs to an ancient tradition of professional mourners whose responsibility is not to grieve on behalf of the bereaved but to choreograph the expression of people’s grief so that it has a public dimension and does not consume the bereaved in its chaos. Lashes moans in order to mourn, continuously tuning into the moan as affect and the moan as expression.

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A long wet shrieking wail gentle calming whimper rocking your sclerosis into tender meat drop a jade for the yellow sea foam your lover’s pee dripping down your long-gone breasts relentless scratching of neglected heartache gaping hole of silence repetitive heavy breathing high pitched wail searching for inherited pain to move a large group of bodies into feeling and then acting the rumble of an incredible rage low groaning of hidden stomachs faces of strangers queerness disrupting complaining nagging resisting resting sighing like a baby uncontrollable crying laughter expressing revisiting a scared me hiding in the closet to move through trauma the release of ghosts to remember another self into being.

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Raoni Muzho Saleh (1991 NL/AFG) is a choreographer/performer based in Amsterdam. He graduated from University of Amsterdam in 2015 – Beachelor in Literary and Cultural Analysis. In 2019 he graduated from SNDO – Bachelor in Choreography. 

Born in Afghanistan and raised in Pakistan, his thinking and work is shaped by fugitivity as a radical movement. Through his personal gender transitioning he has been generating a movement practice of becoming other, meaning becoming a body and spirit unknown to oneself. His recent works are materializations of the seduction of the backspace, which is a concept, a relationality and a spatiality that provokes transformational multiplicity and aims for a sense of being freed from deeply ingrained algorithmic oppressions of binary thinking. In his works he approaches the voice and materiality such as textile, fabrics and dough intertwined intimately with the human body in the aim to disrupt a fixed sense of subjecthood.