Dimen Abdulla

Dimen Abdulla’s new performance Black Cat and White Fox takes place on the threshold between different worlds. The text was produced in a psychotic state and speaks to a reality where delusions, dreams, fictions and the psychiatric clinic become one and the same – if they were ever truly distinct to begin with. In Black Cat and White Fox, it is a collective of “I’s” that speak, disguised at a masquerade, lost in a maze of stories.

The psychotic state disqualifies reality. In The Society of the Spectacle from 1967 the situationist Guy Debord describes how capitalism’s commodity fetishisation and the objectification of everything, including art and relations between people, disconnects production and consumption from actual needs. This too counts as a kind of dissolution of the boundaries between fiction and reality. Black Cat and White Fox explores the question: Who controls the narrative? And how can the collective of “I’s” take it back?

The dense text is performed by students from the Theatre Academy in Luleå. Directed by Abdulla, with dramaturgy by Joakim Sten and directing assistance from the actress Amina Szecsödy, the group conducts a Beckett-esque choreography. The performance has emerged out of an intensive week of readings and workshops at the academy in collaboration with the actor Ulf Friberg. Actors: Alexandro Soltani, Astrid Tägt, Amanda Kilpeläinen Arvidsson, Ivar Forsling, Astrid Gislason, Christoffer Rigeblad, Jannie Östergren, and Natalia Fuentes Araya.

Dimen Abdulla (b. 1984, Kirkuk) is a playwright based in Uddevalla and Stockholm.

Work

Black Cat and White Fox, 2020

Location

Luleå Theatre Academy