We move through porous ground
Performed at (Un)Disturbed Festival (Royal Albert Hall, London, 2019)
Performers: Celeste Combes, Byuka Krow
Director: Byuka Krow
Sound artists: Nicole Bettencourt Coelho & Martina Saorin
Guides: Movement Possession, Themba Mkhize, Audree Barve
Our performance is a durational and immersive ritual, where people are invited to be blindfolded and guided on soil.
The ritual is an antidote to imperialism. We channel the mourning energy of the Royal Albert memorial into the mourning of the earth, transforming colonialist expressions of love into simple human-ecosystem intimacy. The connection to the soil will allow a deep and embodied understanding of nature's cycles of birth and death, regeneration and decay.
The gong sound journey empowers the integration of this alchemy through altered states of consciousness, as well as exploring the healing potential of rave rituals on affected land.
Two blindfolded performers are walking slowly on the two inner circles. They will keep walking at a regular pace for the whole performance. They are holding the ritual space by focusing the intention of the ritual in an embodied manner. They act as guardians of the liminal space-time.
The circles of soil invoke the powerful sense that the process of decolonisation is intergenerational. The human animals before us offered their bodies to earth’s body, as we will be received as well. The soil is a contact point, a portal.
The intention of the ritual is to align us to cyclical time, away from capitalist linear time. We will reconnect collectively to the multispecies ancestral web through this walking meditation, reflecting on how we can become good ancestors for the future kin.
Therefore, the 3 circles of soil become, symbolically, the earth’s clock that we can tap into.
