Mortal Tongues, Immortal Stories
Saturday February 27, 9:00 pm (Buy Tickets)
Saturday March 5, 1:30 pm (Buy Tickets)
The Atlas Performing Arts Center
1333 H St NE
Washington, DC 20002
Dakshina brings an updated version of Mortal Tongues, Immortal Stories to the Atlas Intersections Festival. This multimedia project combines poignant choreography, thought provoking poetry, and evocative visual designs to explore the effect of AIDS in our lives. The dance is inspired by the anthology Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS which includes the work of eight DC poets whose lives and creativity will be celebrated through this performance. Collaborators include poets Chris August and Gowri Koneswaran, Visual Designer Adrian Galvin, and choreographer Daniel Phoenix Singh.
Esteemed dance critic George Jackson writes, “Forget-me-nots are small but persistent flowers. Daniel Phoenix Singh planted a field of them in his new “Mortal Tongues, Immortal Stories”, a dance in memory of the poetry and poets of AIDS…To dance about fear, shame, guilt, remorse, sickness, death, loss, memory, desire, love and life could be daunting. Singh meets the challenge in straightforward ways…”
Singh was moved to create this work when he discovered the anthology of poems and also to commemorate the lost generation of artists and elders in our communities who succumbed to AIDS before it became a manageable condition. While the work traces the struggles and poignancy of the AIDS epidemic, it also engages with the larger context of the times in which the poets were writing. The dance/poetry work addresses complex issues of gender, sexuality, racism, youth, aging, loss, and the shared redemption a community experiences. Ultimately the work bears witness to the lives of the poets, the milieu in which they were writing, and attempts to contextualize it in today’s setting.
Join us for this evocative new work at the Atlas Intersections Festival. Dakshina is thrilled to be selected to participate in one of DC’s well known festivals.
