Скачать или смотреть Moroccan Dada by Neta Elkayam | Voice & Drum (Rehearsal with CabinFever, New Orleans)

An excerpt from the evening-length work The Reddest Wine - I created with choreographer Elana Jacobs and her company CabinFever, alongside Amit Hai Cohen - in which I seek to voice my pain and solidarity with mothers facing the madness of war, displacement, and loss, who keep trying to shield their children and return them to safety. I turn to my grandmothers for guidance - to find meaning in life and to mourn the dead. Inspired by Dada’s refusal of fixed meaning, I “reset” language and composed a Moroccan Dada vocal-and-drum score for a ritual of repetitive mourning, drawing on archival Jewish Amazigh voices. The piece moves between breath and cry, prayer and protest, memory and insistence - a body insisting on life when words fail.

“If it’s a world of written word,
then I’m the illiterate.
I’m alphabet-less.
Canonical texts belong to you, men.
For us women belong the movements,
the moans, the shouts, the screams,
the birth groans.
Ha-wa, hawa, TFU, hai hai, willi miyaa, ya Dada, Dada.
Aaah, Yamma, ya Dada.” — Neta Elkayam

The Reddest Wine — May 7–8, 2025
Featuring: Neta Elkayam, Amit Hai Cohen, Maritza Mercado Narcisse, Emily Craver, A. Raheim White
Artistic direction: Elana Jacobs / CabinFever

Videography: A. Hennen Payne
Audio recorded and mixed by Jesse Solon
Assistant live sound by Aisha RaQuel
The Parlour Gallery, New Orleans