The Revival of the Uzda Gravediggers
Uzda, just outside of Minsk (Belarus), once a thriving center of religious thought, and a stone's throw away from the legendary Smargon Bear Training Academy, is also home to a pair of adjacent cemeteries, one Jewish and one Muslim Tatar.
“Our investigation of this ‘mostly ordinary town’ is a co-creation across nation states, languages, wars, and occupations, crittered by a cast drawn from real life, literature, botany, song, poetry, historical archives, and film. With our partners from the Belarusian literary scene, we set new reality-based fantasies to music, reaching for liberated forms of kinship.”
The piece is a remembering-fantasy designed to destabilize the present moment, reminding us that there's nothing truly inevitable about militarism, cruel austerity, Islamophobia, anti-semitism, and nationalism — ALSO, that we have, and have always had, ingenious ways of getting really pissed off and fighting back, which include loud singing.