choreography/set design Melih Kıraç created with and performed by Tamara Kamola Rashidova music Akira Rabelais, Arvo Part lighting design Utku Kara costume design Hilal Polat co-production Kundura Sahne
premiere Kundura Sahne
 
 
New Skin for the Old Ceremony begins with a memory that has remained intact beneath a layer that begins to move with aging. The work begins with the choreographer’s visit -after his grandmother’s death- to the village in Konya, the place from which she was adopted in the 1930s. It engages with the intrusion of the Uzbek dancer Tamara Kamola Rashidova’s experiences of disconnection from her native language in her dreams. The piece seeks paths in the ‘now’ of the hybridity of past, present, and future. In a fully abstract choreography, the dancer’s body celebrates shedding, dissolution, and transience, participating in a process of remembering a repertoire that cannot be captured by the archive and is recreated anew each time.
Here, the choreography functions as a ceremony - indeed, I hope it also serves as a fantasy and a funeral - a delicate celebration of life and death.