Blending poetry, performance, music, song, and dance into a total theatrical experience, One Thousand and One Nights by Sorour Darabi gives embodied form to nocturnal voices and liberated sexualities. A work that exists beyond normative boundaries, it inhabits the crossroads of gender, embraces ambiguity as a choice, and celebrates a fragile, luminous beauty.

“One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of tales that is at once universal and elusive, with Indian, Persian, and Arab origins. In French, the stories were moralised through the lens of a cisgender heterosexual man, whereas in Persian they have retained far more ambiguity. The language is richer in imagery and more openly erotic. The entire framework of the stories is itself a sexual act: Scheherazade postpones each new tale until the following night an entertainment that also functions as a sexual metaphor, where pleasure is endlessly deferred.”

Identifying with the figure of Scheherazade therefore became an obvious choice:

“She is a creature of the night, with a fluid identity at once pure and deeply sexualised. She is sacrificial, condemned to face death every morning, yet the night is the space where she is allowed to live. It is there that she holds a subversive power over the Sultan’s desire.”

“Through her in-between identity, her freedom to tell stories, and her belonging to the realm of the night, Scheherazade is a queer myth. Every morning, she is threatened by the law of the day the Sultan’s law, and therefore the law of society.”

Initiated during a residency at the Palais de Tokyo in 2022, One Thousand and One Nights brings together eight performers and a wide range of artistic forms within an approach that is at once poetic, visual, musical, theatrical, and, above all, vocal. This multidisciplinary vision of a total artwork is itself a response to the normative boundaries of artistic genres.

“Everything began with seven poems, which quickly called for music and song. From that point on, every element of the work evolved more or less simultaneously. I work in a very intuitive and fluid way. It is also a form of resistance to the capitalist logic of efficiency.”

“I also seek to push bodies to their limits, but above all to bring other bodies and other transgender voices into the work. Opera, as a classical form, has become one of the strongholds of heteronormative elitism. By contrast, I want to explore aesthetics that embrace an unconventional kind of beauty fragile, torn, even monstrous, perhaps, but above all a beauty that reaches us at the deepest level.”

Sorour Darabi also conceives One Thousand and One Nights as an ephemeral sculptural installation, composed of chains encased in blocks of melting ice.

“In the East, the harem is a place of water, reflections, and mirrors a liquid space, but above all a space of female power. It is where politics and entertainment coexist.”

Suspended between liquidity and minerality, fragility and hardness, One Thousand and One Nights gives material form to the passing of time so central to Scheherazade’s story.

“For me, above all, it evokes a profound sense of urgency.”

“I’m drawn to this coexistence of ugliness and beauty. It is a transgender harem post-human, dystopian, gothic, and futuristic; at once deeply sensual and ice-cold.”

ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

World Premiere

28–30 June 2024
Montpellier Danse