Mourning/Moaning Sociality (sold out)

Raoni Muzho Saleh invites you to come together in a space that holds our mourning and grief central. A space where you don’t have to get rid of your grief, but where your mourning is the proof of the love for the person/thing you’ve lost. A space that honors the grooves of our skin that have become valleys filled with loss, rage, sorrow and hysterical humor.

The intention for this space is that in togetherness we practice to love and praise our broken-heartedness and our resilience. Raoni envisions it as a place where tears are received with gracious hands, where wailing is encouraged by other shivering voices, and where we grief and lament our suffering through the proximity of kindred bodies so that we don’t suffer in silence or in isolation. 

We will start with building a grief altar together with stories of our grief. Raoni will introduce the technique of the moaning through some warm-up exercises. Then we’ll go into collective moaning and we’ll end with a grounding exercise. At the end of the session there will be some tea and snacks. We can use this moment to reflect on how the experience was collectively and individually.

Raoni Muhzo Saleh offers moaning because he believes that regaining a sensuous relationship to our own voices and the voices of others is extremely essential in queer world-making. In his experience, the wide spectrum of moaning frees up and brings into movement our emotions, our imaginative mind, our sensuality and our feeling of belonging. This space does not require any voice or body experience. All that wants to be held and heard within you is welcome. 

For the grief altar, Raoni invites you to bring along a picture/drawing/name of someone who’s passed, and whose beautiful broken-heartedness you want to jive on. Also bring along something sweet that they might’ve liked! 

About Raoni Muzho Saleh

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.