NB: THE RED THREAD BANQUET is currently in development, and looking for funding for an initial writers room to be able to pay 8 female writers from the SWANA to participate in developing the narrative that unfolds between the 8 archetypes of the feminine. I, along with my creative producer, are in the process of looking for grants and private funding, as well as sponsors and partnerships to develop the content and an initial run, with the intention to produce a high end version of the interactive, theatrical narrative dining experience. The experience is scalable and will be developed for touring, with the aim of running it in the UK and the UAE initially, then adapted to other cultural contexts.
Dine in the presence of 8 unnamed women from the SWANA's past and present, as they converge around a table to deliberate the visible and invisible forces that have shaped our narratives of the feminine so far.
THE RED THREAD BANQUET (an episode of ARDUNA) THE RED THREAD BANQUET is a theatrical immersive dining experience staged outside of time. 8 archetypes of women whose lives have been chronicled in 'past and present' Arab culture are insinuated at the table amongst guests.
The banquet unfolds through projected content, narrative objects, interactive audio and real-time data visualisation capturing guests’ responses to curated prompts around narratives of the feminine. Through critical conversations/ intentional choices, guests collectively shape the 9th archetype: the woman of the future. Throughout the banquet, we, and the women, are held together in safety within a liminal space outside of the constructs and constriction of linear time, by an unnamed force; a protector who watches over us, leaving sediments of her presence, but only for the most attentive, engaged and curious. She holds us and holds this space long enough for us to engage in critical thought, active examination and collective narration of what we'll carry forward as we collectively shape the 9th archetype, the woman of the future. Her presence is felt, but only seen in traces around the space. This framework builds on my previous work titled INTRANSIENCE, which intentionally stages the narrative outside of familiar constructs of temporality and meaning making, and uses a dialectic approach to privilege polyphonic narratives over imposed authoritative accounts.
What is unexamined is internalised, perpetuated, and has the potential to transform into forms of violence, passed on through generations and practiced on women in the future, at times even by women.
It is our duty to purposefully examine the way we’ve been chronicling women in our region, whose voices their stories have been told through, what we’ve deemed worthy of remembering, and what we’ve been passively and actively omitting from what is carried forward.
THEMES:
Invisible Threads
For every named woman in SWANA history, thousands of unnamed women carried civilisation forward through daily acts of care, resistance, and survival.
Capitalist Erasure
Only "productive" women celebrated, while women who diverge from capitalist definitions of that are rendered invisible, or framed as deficient.
Patriarchal Influence
Women remembered only through male narratives, or narratives that uphold and celebrate patriarchal standards and values, as well as reducing women to moral exemplars or cautionary tales.
Colonial Narratives
Stories sanitised, marginalised or exoticised by colonial or orientalist perspectives, divorcing women from their agency as part of wider efforts to weaken the fabric of indigenous communities, and erase forms of inherent or potential power that can arise from within them.
Ancestral Severance
Situating narratives within linear time, perpetuating the illusion of historical progression away from the past, separating past wisdom from present possibility, and preventing intergenerational dialogue.
