KALUNDU

Benjamin Abras is a multidisciplinary artist, equally at home in visual arts, poetry, and the performing arts. At the heart of all his work is the body, the Black body, its capacity for reception and expression. After more than twenty years of dance experience and residencies and performances on four continents, Benjamin Abras possesses a unique physical language: Afro Butoh.

The collected sound fragments and voices accumulate on and within the body. Resonating with his father's legacy and philosophical tools, they transform and reshape the physical language, until the performer, like a book, becomes the vessel for the extraordinary stories of his travels. He becomes the focal point of numerous presences: He dances the voices that inhabit his voice, creating an endless spiral of memories. He celebrates oral culture and its physicality, in which ancestors constantly whisper; he conjures poetry and evokes resilience. For the Black body is less a site of “fixed identity” than an intersection of other possibilities.

Here, in KALUNDU, Benjamin Abras is accompanied by Lucas Sevaux and his electronic soundscapes. KALUNDU will be presented in Germany for the first time as part of the Black Berlin Black – Festivity festival.