SOUL FAMINE

This performance is part of a combiticket option.

Text from Zahira:

“In Soul Famine I take people on a journey so they can travel inward. It’s an invitation to look at our own minds, our mental health. The other pandemic. The mental health crisis. I feel an urgency personally, and on a societal level, to tackle this in an engaging way, in a very inviting way. With humor. Because I think right now we all crave laughter, but also more self-awareness and context.”

We are gathered here today in memory of our beloved

When we heard they were no more, we were shocked and saddened

We are now deprived of them

They were oh so loved by many

While we mourn this loss, we pay tribute to what once was

They were committed to peace, harmony, and spreading joy

Our beloved didn’t choose to depart on their own

They were forced into death

INSPIRATION: My keywords to create this performance are absurdity, humor, silence ,and intelligence. My style of creating a performance is a collage. I present different scenes that do not create a story, but a common thread around the theme. For this project, I was inspired by Samuel Beckett’s classic, Waiting for Godot. The content of this piece has always inspired me because it touches on the meaninglessness of life itself, but Beckett does it in such a way that there is still a glimmer of hope. This is something I want to achieve with my work. By this I mean, I am a maker who likes to address social themes. In the past I’ve created work around sexual trauma such as Reclaiming the Goddess, and I’m currently working on mental health. Even though these are serious themes, I like to do it in a way that is so surreal and so strange that it becomes recognizable. I’m super interested in the absurdity of things. I am a big fan of existential philosophy. Why do things exist? Why does my mind exist? Why does depression exist? Does it actually exist or is it a figment of my own imagination? Those are the kinds of questions I ask myself.

This brings me to one of my other sources of inspiration, Marina Abramovic, and in particular the experiment she did in 2010 at the MoMA in New York, The Artist is Present. I am fascinated by long silences. It somehow makes people uncomfortable. I feel that silence is confrontational without trying to be confrontational. It can create a deeper engagement of both the artist and the audience. No, I won’t sit in front of another person for eight hours a day, for three months, but I really enjoy the integrity and intensity of silence as opposed to the chaos of the world and the monkey mind where thoughts travel 100 kilometers. per hour through the mind. And I like old-fashioned slapstick like Charlie Chaplin. I’m super impressed with The Kid from 100 years ago. He was a master of silent film and tragicomedy. Quiet. And yet so expressive. Tragic. Yet so funny.

MOTIVATION: I like to use dark humor to work with serious social and personal themes. To approach the tragedy of life in that way. I started using the term “soul hunger” as a way of describing depression. It is related to the desire to live a reality other than the darkness I can experience in my mind. It is the feeling of having a greater purpose and not feeling well aligned with your current reality, which can cause depression. With Soul Famine I want to express this soul hunger, to make the absurdity of depression visible, audible and tangible. And even: laughable.