National premiere

A choreographic solo by Benjamin Kahn
created for Sati Veyrunes
Created on March 25, 2023
KLAP Maison pour la danse – Marseille
In the frame of the festival + de Genres

In September 2020, a group of mothers from New Jersey decided to gather in a park and scream loudly. They felt neglected in the fight against the pandemic. The act of shouting collectively, claiming space in front of one’s own ego and sharing that need in an informal gathering seemed to be a soothing pratic in these times of despair. Following this first collective cry, the New York Times installed a public telephone line in the hope of serving those who need a primal cry. One of the starting points of our research is the clamor of social protest from these mothers, as well as from many other women in recent decades. 
With the performer/soloist Sati Veyrunes and he composer Lucia Ross, Kahn wanted to question the means of expression related to urgency. The cry is extremely poorly documented in the history of philosophy and the social sciences. Most often likened to anger, hysteria and chaos, it is censored in the language we use. This solo is an attempt to reappropriate this radical expression in order to articulate and tame this extremely raw and stunning material. Through a powerful physical and sonic journey, it is a question of allowing the public to encounter beauty, harmony and symmetry, making this vital impulse accessible again. We can consider the cry as the most instantaneous and audible form of personal urgency towards the political and public space. It becomes a dramaturgic and choreographic tool, facilitating the cohabitation and mixing of different realities and their state of crisis.
"Bless the Sound that Saves a Witch like me" is written in the plural, to underline the diversity of realities and the infinitely diverse cries that coexist within us and around us. There is this intimate and existential cry and the public cry, from personal urgency to collective. There is in the writing the solo and the choir, as a loneliness marked by all struggles. Crossed by the complexity of their indissociable coexistences, Bless… tries to invest the boundaries between the intimate and the collective and the possibility of a necessary liberation.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.