Farci.e shows how language can be experienced as a strangling corset of established gender norms.
DOUBLE BILL W/ MONIRA AL QADIRI
What happens when you have been raised in a ‘neutral’ language (a language that has no gender differentiations) and arrive in a country where everything has a gender? How can we speak about identity when a language already determines what is male or female?
The young Iranian artist Sorour Darabi was confronted with this when he/she arrived in Montpellier to study dance. Farsi, Darabi’s mother tongue, has no masculine or feminine forms, and it is of no interest – in any case grammatically – whether it is a man or a woman who is speaking (the word for gender is ‘ تیسنج jenssiat’, which means ‘material’). French, on the other hand, constantly forces her/him to distinguish male from female, even in the search for his/her language of movement. Accepting a word becomes a physical ordeal.
With charming impertinence, Darabi rebels against this violent form of authority. Farci.e is an androgynous solo that flirts with the limits of gender, an almost wordless monologue in which Sorour Darabi savours a language all her/his own.
As part of TASHWEESH, a 10-day multidisciplinary festival about feminism in the Middle-East, North Africa and Europe. w/ Goethe-Institut Brüssel
Picture © Mehrdad Motejalli
