Nwando Ebizie
Fire Prevention
Or
How to sing a labyrinth
Or
The rebeing and the burning of the labyrinth
Image credit Claudia Rossi ft still by Richard Simkins
TX:
Sunday 22nd November, 11.45am – 12.30pm & 6pm – 6.45pm
A co-commission with Supernormal Festival for 2020 / 2021
An experiment in an audio-ing a labyrinth; tangling and untangling the thwarted pathways of a mythopoetisised history towards a transformational fire ritual.
How to weave a story into being when I am caught, tangled in the middle
How to reach the crux when the wyrding way turns me about and about and I know the point is far away. And I have to crawl on bandaged knee to get there
How to share a journey when you were never there to feel the stony ground
What rough beast is waiting, waiting to be born in the embers
When were they burned?
The task of the wild woman is to open and be opened
The doors of perception are always just beyond reach but a constant cycle of life death life, of re-initiation will bestow many keys
The labyrinth will determine the correct key
And you are the whole
The task of the wild woman is to open eyes and open thighs and allow the light to pour in
To pull the thread and follow around the walkways
Then gather it all together and weave the tapestry of her own existence
To gather dead stuff, lay it down, sing over it, breathe from the vagas enraptured soul and begin again, remake the broken body and sing the old song until it is new.
We travel through time and space while we listen
You my friend and I
I guide you and you guide me
Maybe by the end of you listening to me I will have the answers
Includes binaural recordings, headphone listening welcomed.
Nwando Ebizie is a constellation point for a spectrum of multidisciplinary works that call for RADICAL change.
She challenges her audience to question their perceived realities through art personas, experimental theatre, neuroscience, music and African diasporic ritualistic dance. Carving out her own particular strand of Afrofuturism, she combines research into the neuroscience of perception (inspired by her own neurodiversity) and an obsession with science fiction with a ritualistic live art practice.
Works include her immersive sensory environment Distorted Constellations, her pop persona Lady Vendredi (a blaxploitation heroine from another dimension!) and the building of her long-term operatic experience, Hildegard: Visions. This award winning work has toured across the world. She has performed in Tokyo (Bonobo), Rio de Janeiro (Tempo Festival), Berlin (Chalet), Latvia (Baltais Fligelis Concert Hall) and Zurich (Blok) as well as across the UK from Home MCR to the Barbican and Southbank Centre.
Nwando works across media, genre and artforms creating mythopoetic metanarratives and alternate realities. Her work is a drawing together of the pieces that she is in a frozen moment of ever-living infinite regress.
Always political and grounded in a mytho-scientific perspective she invites viewers and participants to join her at the Crossroads. At the crossroads where you can choose to pass through the cosmic mirror and touch alternate realities. The realities of what could have been and what should have been and what may possibly be. She works with speculative fictions, possible dreams and lucid worlds.