ttff/23 Closing Night + Festival Awards

Ototeman

A first version of this performance triptych was initially created for a concert which had the violins of the Holocaust witnesses and Gowka drums of emancipation from Enslavement of Guadeloupe converge on the same stage. In this renewed, edited and improved filmic version, each performance of the triptych was shot on a slave cemetery—or as I prefer to call them, a mass grave—in Guadeloupe (French West Indies). This performance film aims at raising awareness about those territories where still lay thousands, millions of bodies, desecrated through ages, desintegrating over centuries, under the earth, the soil, the sand… Forgotten forever, without sepulchres, without memories, without history.

Stray Birds

An excerpt from Rubindranath Tagore’s work “Stray Birds” – Aphorisms or short tales with micro meanings on man, nature and his environment

In the Whiteness

“in the whiteness” is a poetic exploration of identity through the eyes of a Harari-Ethiopian woman, displaced via war, now living in Canada. She uses poetry and movement as a meditative method of reconnecting with her roots and in doing so, establishes a magical bond with her ancestors.

Pappyshow in the Dark Time, My Love

“pappyshow in the dark time, my love” is a braided essay that asks participants about their relationships to concepts of revenge and justice. The accompanying soundscape and interludes investigates the potentiality of the call and response nature of Black sound for destruction and regeneration. Consisting of an admixture of soca, noise, techno and poetry, these sounds accompany the video and makes clear a confluence of sonic alliances across time and geographic specificity within Black diasporas. These interludes punctuate the essay as a reminder of our histories of resistance that have been syncretized into cultural festivals, namely J’ouvert in Trinidad and Tobago. Looking specifically at the social function of these genres and their use in public space to incite chaos within the context of pleasure, I highlight a lineage of Black musical provocation as an analogy for flattening existing hegemony and the commons. How can song conjure the sublime, necessary, and oft resisted work of deconstruction? Here, a desire for revenge and restitution can function like a bassline on J’ouvert morning: a scaffold for channeling body memory and a hope for something-somewhere-better than here; loose and freeing under the cover of night. The soundscape’s droning bassline plays throughout the video and materializes itself in the viewer’s body: dread made tactile.

Boys

“Boys” is a film is a hybrid, blurring the lines between documentary, fiction and imagination. It’s improvisation, play and time spent with true friends. “Boys” is the playfulness and pressure of being a boy, trying to be a man; the bright, bold colour of youth bursting through. Born out of the ideas behind The PappyShow theatre company’s award-winning stage show (The Barbican, Vaults Festival), “Boys” the film is devised by and stars a group of young men of colour.

The Noise My Leaves Make

The Noise my Leaves Make is a contemporary dance film that explores Black womanhood and the rural environment in England.

The film follows three dark-skinned Black women as they utilise their Africanist and Contemporary dance vocabulary to engage with the Leicestershire environment. As Black British women, this space has typically been denied to them as a place of belonging. Through their movement, these three women claim the countryside as their own finding sisterhood, connection, and joy.

Eclipsis

A recently discovered monarch butterfly subspecies (scientifically named “Danaus plexippus eclipsis”) possesses strange toxins in its scales that cause powerful sensorial alterations in its predators. Intertwining vivid colors and textures of microscopic footage with the sway of the human body, this is a sci-fi speculation about what would happen to human beings if they came across the Eclipsis butterfly in the midst of our hurting world.

A Syncretism in Kayryouacou

In this Carib Futuristic performance art presentation, the spirit of Carriacou’s Shakespeare Mas is transmuted into a digital vocal chorale. Two participants evaluate their place in the world from their small island “wings” of Grenada.

Consequences of Remembering

Experimental video work based on trauma faced in 2021 using photography from both that time and now.

Ototeman

In the Whiteness

Pappyshow in the Dark Time, My Love

Boys

Eclipsis

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