ROUTES
Collaboration/Improvisation: Diana Sabri & LeyyaTawil
Frown Tails Platform – Athens, Greece
What do we carry on with from what we create and what do we then create from what we carry?. In the here and now that finds its’ self to communicate as two people meet, to gather, two-gether.
Leyya Tawil and I spent 5 days in Athens sharing our experiences and thoughts about our identity as beings of the Palestinian diaspora. How we deal with our sense of origin; our sense of home; and what does it mean to be Palestinian?.
This process stimulated conversations and improvisations in outdoor spaces that accumulated into a duet improvisation performance and a video of our discussions.
As part of the I.D.entity research project, this duet focused on our memories and experiences of when we visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I was driven to explore how the process of documenting memory can take place in performance.
I was very interested in the idea of drawing through movement, for the quality it possesses in leaving an un-erasable mark behind, a trace, a point of reference, a journey of where one has been, where one is now and is about to go.
How the intangibility of memory can take a physical form in performance; and how the personal memory of a place is inevitably created by the conditions that shaped these past experiences, which both Leyya Tawil and myself had, when we visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The duet was set against a white blank wall, which served as a metaphor for absence, erasure, fear of extinction whilst it also was literally a canvas for marking our memories, resistance and presence against it, in the process of moving/drawing together.
