The intention for this space is that in togetherness we practice to love and praise our broken-heartedness and our resilience. It’s a place where tears are received with gracious hands, where wailing is encouraged by other shivering voices, and where we moan 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 moaning and wailing through some warm-up exercises. From here, we’ll immerse ourselves into a collective moaning session that ends with a grounding exercise. At the end of the session there will be time for tea and snacks. We can use this moment to reflect with one another on this experience of mourning collectively and individually.
Raoni offers this practice 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 and already present, is welcome.
For the grief altar, Raoni invites you to bring along a picture/drawing/name of someone or something you want to honour. If possible also bring something sweet they might like.
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 – bachelor 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.