19:30 – 22:30 (doors open at 19:15)
Each festival day is programmed as one continuous performance: local and international artists share the stage. Stories, performance, dance, music and food gestures overlap. You will be welcomed into a ritualized, collective space.
Share, taste, listen, move, be with us…
A musical invitation. Anastasis Sarakatsanos greets us with an intimate soundscape, inviting us to arrive fully—physically, emotionally, together—as we tune in to each other and the space around us. His music offers a gentle way to ground ourselves before we transition into the unfolding of the day.
In Three Songs to Re-member: A Tree, Lina Issa moves through landscapes of memory and loss, of grief and joy, exploring what it means:
To inherit a tree that you can never touch, to pass on a trauma to your child, and to conserve seeds of people that are being exterminated.
Who are we when we narrate our stories through plant spirits?
You are invited to join the Legacy & Seeds performance ritual. This evening is the first of two publicperformance rituals. Legacy & Seeds performance ritual has been developed through a series of Labs and the BAUairDOTE residency in an open creation and preparation process. The process and this evening’s performance ritual has been led by Fazle Shairmahomed with plant spirits and artists-in-community Anima Jhagroe-Ruissen and Farah Rahman, other community members and in collaboration with DOTE, Shaymaa Shoukry and Ahmed Saleh.
You will be guided through the ritual by Fazle Shairmahomed, plant spirits, and other space holders. Shaymaa Shoukry will join the process by leading a physical gesture within the ritual.
An impulse of the practice that is being shared this evening is: A plant spirit, which migrated 50 years ago with Fazle’s Nani (his mother’s mother) from Surinam to Netherlands. Fazle’s journey with this plant spirit has allowed them to develop an artistic/spiritual practice that invites people to develop their own personal and communal connections with plant spirits.
In the Labs, preparation rituals, we connected with plant spirits through dance and all our senses, asking the question: How can we be in solidarity? In a time where we are witnessing genocides and ecocides on our screens, it feels like we are failing as humanity.
How did we arrive at a place where humans think of themselves as separated from nature? How come indigenous people who nurture deep relations with land are still being uprooted today? While we resist, it is important to keep honouring life, to show up in solidarity when we both hold space for grief, and honour a sense of togetherness.
The Legacy & Seeds performance ritual will take place a second time, to close the festival on Saturday 7 December. This will be both a continuation, and will include a new element, developed in a series of four Festival Labs, in which Shaymaa Shoukry and Ahmed Saleh will share their collaborative practice, and which you can join here.
The Festival Bar will open after the performance program for release, mourning, celebration or comfort.
