Darling(s)
DARLING (2013) emerged from the friendship between Moya Michael and Igor Shyshko, two artists born in the same year yet shaped by radically different socio‑political realities: apartheid South Africa and post‑Chornobyl Soviet Belarus. Their conversations on nationality, place, and historical circumstance gave rise to a performance tracing their individual and overlapping timelines, from their birth year in 1976 to their meeting in 1997. Through archival recordings, political speeches, and personal sound memories, they built a dense aural collage that became an autonomous presence within the performance, a “third dancer” mediating between historical narrative and the corporeal present.
In 2026, the choreographers revisit the work and invite a new generation of six performers from Brazil, Palestine, Ireland, South Africa, and Belgium, all born around 1992. This new creation, Darling(s), extends the original’s foundation and questions by mapping the performers’ personal and political trajectories from 1992 to 2026. Once again, weaving a collective sonic fabric echoing their lived and inherited histories.
Darling(s) explores how we listen across difference, distance, and time. It stages a meditation on the invisible threads that connect us, where parallel histories unfold side by side and intersect through archive, sound, and embodied memory. The performance situates the body as a dynamic site where socio‑political narratives converge, mutate, and persist, inviting audiences into an act of transhistorical listening, one that reveals how personal and collective pasts continue to resonate through the present.
Credits
Concept and direction Moya Michael, Igor Shyshko Creation in collaboration with performers Marah Haj Hussein, Arno Verbruggen, Rima Baransi, Astrid Sweeney, Patric Da Cunha, Darion Adams With the support of The taxshelter of the Belgian federal government