Elnebishy
The borderland: dark promise - 2024
Nazar Rakhmanov - Frascatti, AmsterdamThe borderland takes you on a journey between myth, fiction and reality. Fusing choreography, music and ritual through video and live acts, five performers reclaim darkness as a space for freedom and imagination. The spectacle desires to offer an alternative to the disenchanted world of permanent illumination, control and surveillance.
In The borderland: dark promise Russian-Tatar choreographer Nazar Rakhmanov reflects on the liminality of those who were forced to migrate but who lack the possibility to settle. The performance researches borders - not just geopolitical frontiers, but also the boundaries between light and darkness, clarity and obscurity, consciousness and unconsciousness.
In these oppositions, the darker counterparts offer a gate towards the missing self-integrity, existing beyond societal dissociation and labeling. Through the obscure, the individual regains ones own power and can dissolve differences between one and the other. It’s in this realm where imagination and dreams actually dwells, where we might become one again.
By placing the spectators in the dark and giving the performers full control over what they get to see and how, The borderland: dark promise reverses the power dynamics between the observer and the one who’s being observed. The surveillance camera becomes a server of the inhabitants of the shadow, exposing the shared anxiety of one's spiritual and political existence.