Nightworld

“Nightworld” is a performative encounter between choreographer and dancer Kim Teitelbaum and musician and voice artist Zohar Shafir, through the text “The Persian Poems” by Kathy Ackers, taking on the experience of the women/girl body as a compromised front. 

“The Persian Poems” follows the story of Janey Smith, a young girl held captive in an unknown location by Ali – a Persian slave trader. In the small room she is held in, she teaches herself Persian. The poems are written in the format of a language textbook, where English and Persian tests appear side by side. The content is of a simple declarative nature, and reality is often described with cold facts. This is how we learn about the circumstances of her life and her state of mind.

“Nightworld” brings the figure of Janey Smith to life through diverse means, including composed text, recitation, dance, costumes, and video, with which we touch the traumatic experience. After a traumatic event, the body, language, gender, and identity may be destabilized and reconnected in a skewed way. In this space, like in the creative space, the realistic syntax loses its logic.

In the show, we compare this experience of disintegration to the language-learning process described in “The Persian Poems.” In the text, Janey uses the psychological tactic of alienation or detachment. The cold reporting of what is happening allows her to express herself. We, in turn, use the same alienation mechanism by employing repetition, deconstructing the text, and creating friction between the spoken text and the performance. For us, learning the language is symbolic of the disintegration of the soul, one’s alienation from oneself and the longing to connect the parts together and reach understanding.

About the artists: 

Zohar Shafir is a very active musician and performer in the experimental music scene. At the same time, she also releases pop albums with unique sound. In her collaborations, and in her solo project “Nico Teen”, Shafir deconstructs and reassembles the distinctive structures of pop music and explores vocal expression through original texts, which are also influenced by popular music.

Kim Teitelbaum focuses on dance as a radical realm that can generate a mental and systemic shift. For him, invoking the fantastical or the imaginative can produce tools for interesting and wild connections. These, in turn, can lead to new and fascinating tactics of the performance choreography, practice, and thought.