Day 1 - The Artists Are Present #1

Rituals, migration, transformation

Roshanak Morrowatian – Sister
"What should be a debate about people – about human beings, about children and families – has been deliberately poisoned to become a debate about borders and security." – Journalist Behrouz Boochani

Sister is an installation-performance, a life-size wax sculpture of a melting girl. The installation-performance pays tribute to the resilience of children in areas of political and social turmoil. Roshanak Morrowatian creates a choreography on a non-living body and uses melting as the choreographic language. The audience is invited for a moment of reflection, a moment to collectively pause and acknowledge. The media bombards us with groups of refugees, masses, numbers. With Sister an intimate encounter is created with one girl, one child. And how in time, slowly, her story unfolds and she transforms in order to survive.

Keren Rosenberg – Re-Surface
“Will you dare to dance with fire?”
The journey of awakening imagination and empathy
Going Primal is a physical and ritualistic performative novel by Keren Rosenberg which consists of six chapters of performative experiences, that seeks to bring the body back in time, to its primal roots: boundless and free.
In immersive cross-disciplinary performative spaces – both in real life and in virtual environments – boundaries between performers, audience, and space dissolve into an energetically charged and ecstatic experience. Using her method of Body-House as the ‘language’ that is shared with both performers and spectators, Keren gives keys to enter to the unfolding experiences with an open heart and a physically present body.
Re-Surface is the introductory chapter of the performative novel. A physical and metaphysical energetic exchange between the emotional moving body of Keren, the audience members and the shamanistic scenography of Prem Scholte Albers. In an intimate space, rubbing close against the skins of audience members, Keren acts as the medium that is channelling the energy of the attendees, the sculptures and the vibration of the surroundings. Illuminating beyond the physical body, in waves overflowing spaces, time and dimensions of perception.

Reza Mirabi – Listening To Stone Beings
Unable to attend the forty days mourning ceremony 13 years ago, Reza Mirabi now wishes to ritualize his grief (ذکر Zikr - literally meaning ‘remembrance’ )- for his grandfather, Jawad Mirabi, through a story. Together with cellist Sheng-Chiun Lin, and Percussionist Khaled Abdou, Mirabi invites on an embodied journey through non-linear time, to get lost in transpersonal memories of displacement, and to find himself as a 12-year-old boy in the Kurdish Valley of Zaman (دره زمان).

Roshanak Morrowatian

Roshanak Morrowatian (Iran, 1989) is a choreographer, dancer, actress, performer and lives in Maastricht. She holds a BA in dance and MA in dance composition from the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany. After studying modern dance, Roshanak worked as a freelance dancer, performer and actress in the independent scene at home and abroad before pursuing her interest in choreography. She danced and performed in the work of Marina Abramovic, Pina Bausch, Joost Vrouenraets and others. For the performance Polished, she received the BNG Dance Award together with Mami Izumi and was part of the DansClick 22 tour. Roshanak won the Dutch Dance Days Award in 2020.

The desire for a more harmonious society runs like a thread through Roshanak's work. Unnoticed details, invisible people and forgotten stories take the leading role in her choreographies. Interdisciplinary performances in which themes such as identity, borders and belonging are central. As an artist, she searches for the physical roots in memory, the redefinition of traditions and rituals and where our movements come from.

Keren Rosenberg

Keren Rosenberg (IL) is an Amsterdam-based Performance Artist / Creator/ developer of the Body-House method / Coach & Mentor.  As an artist, her work explores the theme of embodiment, energy, reciprocity, connection, and emancipation. She designs spaces and physically embodied rituals and creates performative experiences for humans to connect to themselves, to each other and to the universe through us.

Her works were presented in festivals, site-specific, venues and theaters across The Netherlands, Sweden, UK, Canada, Iceland, France, China, Israel, Australia, Ireland, Ethiopia, Mexico, and Italy.

In 2011, Keren was invited by Ohad Naharin to study the Gaga movement language and become a certified teacher. For the past 10 years she has been sharing the Gaga movement language and her method, Body-House, with thousands of people around the world, both nationally and internationally, in physical and virtual spaces, with professional performance artists, the generation of tomorrow, humans of all ages, humans of golden age and humans with different abilities and the audience members who came to witness Keren’s artistic work. Through her artistic works, workshops and coaching Keren is facilitating immersive practices that offer a unique integration between expressive arts, wellbeing, and transformation.

Keren is artist in residence at ICK Amsterdam and is supported by the Dutch Performing Arts Fund, Amsterdam funds for the arts and culture house de Vlugt. Together with de Vlugt she is building a new community-based in the new west of Amsterdam for those who wish to step into an expressive and authentic experience within an intimate and trustful setting.

Reza Mirabi

Reza Mirabi (Iran/Germany) believes that everything, every place, every being, and all material is always already telling a story. Instead of overwriting these stories, Mirabi looks for ways to enter into states of embodied listening to re-write ourselves back into these more-than-human narratives. Listening for him becomes a choreographic process and political act to tap into archives that live in and around us but that have been rendered invisible; both personal and collective histories, memories, and forms of loss. More recently, Mirabi has moved out of the black box and into site-specific contexts, where listening becomes the ground for co-composing with the material textures, languages, and (hi)stories of a place. Reza Mirabi studied Fine Arts at the University of Mumbai (2012) and graduated from DAS Choreography, Master program at the University of the Arts, Amsterdam (2021).  