HAUS MAWU with Mandhla Ndubiwa, Aaro Assy and ZOE - "ECHOES"

A ritual sound performance in which three multidisciplinary artists with diaspora experience weave movement, sound and poetry into a shared act of vulnerability. A space for mourning injustice and loss, for devotion, transformation and joy. Through echo, call-and-response and emotional expression, the performers invoke the presence of their ancestors and trace fragmented stories and their continuing impact in the diaspora.

The audience is invited to enter a protected space of witnessing that gradually transforms into relationship and ultimately into actual participation. Guided through the art of ballroom-commentary - a bridge between ritual and club space. This is a guiding voice that holds the space, reads it and shifts the energy. It carries both mourning and joy, leading into the subsequent afterparty as a continuation of the performance.

With the aim of reflecting realities through folklore, fiction and popular culture, performance artist and director ZOE founded the ensemble HAUS MAWU as a space where bodies and stories become visible within a post-patriarchal heterotopia. The company understands itself as a collaborative initiative for diverse artists, with emphasis on the intersections of diaspora, feminist and queer perspectives.

In this context, ZOE has collaborated with performer and artist Mandhla Ndubiwa - a transfeminine Zimbabwean multimedia performer, musician and voice of the German ballroom community - and with Aaro Assy, a transfeminine Egyptian DJ, music producer and ballroom performer, to develop ECHOES.