Maryam Bagheri Nesami performs One Song Two Sides Bold Breathing - The Missing Score, 2018 by Helga Fassonaki

Maryam Bagheri Nesami performs One Song Two Sides Bold Breathing - The Missing Score, 2018 by Helga Fassonaki

https://vimeo.com/392835971

University of Auckland, April 2018 After Helga Fassonaki’s Khal scores were shown in exhibitions across New Zealand in 2015, all but one of the sixteen scores were returned as gifts to the original participants. Matana Roberts, the recipient of “One Song Two Sides Bold Breathing,” was in the process of shifting homes and asked that Fassonaki keep her score. After meeting an amazing dancer, Maryam Bagheri Nesami, originally from Tehran, Iran, at a Khal opening at Nga Taonga Sound & Vision in Auckland, she knew the project would not be complete without her involvement. Fassonaki asked Nesami, if she would interpret one of the Khal scores into a solo dance piece. She accepted to interpret "One Song Two Sides Bold Breathing". The exchange occurred in November 2015. Fassonaki shipped the score to Nesami on July 18, 2016 however on August 10th 2016, she had the misfortune of receiving the package returned, ripped and re-taped in a plastic bag, with a lovely note from United States postal service letting her know that they care and another letter stating that they found the empty parcel in the mail and believe that the contents were separated during handling. It made it as far as LAX transit from Highland Park, Los Angeles. The score had survived Iranian customs and postal service, the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, the North Atlantic Ocean, Brooklyn to Los Angeles, the Pacific Ocean, the Coral Sea, the Tasman Sea, but then lost highway from Highland Park to LAX before even leaving the city. Some things do happen for a reason – perhaps to redirect us to something that was initially missing from the story. Despite the score's physical disappearance, Nesami, re-naming the score “The Missing Score” used images Fassonaki sent her to interpret the score into a dance performance. She performed different iterations and interpretations of it (including this one) and made it part of her PHD thesis studies at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. Speaking about her idea behind these performances she wrote: “The project had been ongoing; like a river flow; the project-river had its initiative roots in the land of Persia and now it was branching back to this land by passing me by in Pacifica. Through a chapter of the book 'The Pink Guitar, writing as feminist practice' written by the American poet, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, I got referred to the photo 'Violin D’ Ingres' by Man Ray and a violin-like shape of the woman body, emphasising on the 'sexy', remarkable curvature of a shaped body by placing two “f” facing each other and referring to the words: femininity- fluidity-function. Having a functioning violin-like body means that you should create pleasant, tuned and harmonic voices. But what defines me as being tuned or false? Accordance and discordance, off beat, off the centre, eccentric… whether as a dancing woman in Iran, or as a Middle Eastern woman on the international stage, I had to deal with this: my eccentric position, my situated-ness responsive to the dominant homogeneous gaze. But where am I situated? Whom am I representing? A Muslim woman? An Iranian contemporary artist? A dancer? A Middle Eastern? A suppressed voice? I have often been challenged by 'where to perform', regarding the place, and the question 'for whom to perform?'. As a solo maker, this challenge can be resonated while one side of the question is always standing an 'I', a subject, an identity and the other side as the judging and perceiving gaze. What I did through The Missing Score, I tried to trigger this judging gaze and subvert its presumptions. I used the very accessible icon of Iranian-ness, the veil…" - Maryam Bagheri Nesami, c2017

Uploaded 2020-02-20T23:34:35.000Z Wakefield TV Installers