new artist statement! feedback appreciated :) The Kibuki film began as an experiment. I was on a language study in Zanzibar, when I met Asha, a spirit healer and the leader of a ring of dancers who use trance and hypnosis to let go of their bodies, to move with inhuman rhythms. The kibuki spirits are a pantheon of mystical creatures who enter these dancers, climb into their heads, and possess them. I was so fascinated with the kibuki that I began hanging around Asha’s compound during the slow hours between ritual dances. On a tropical afternoon, while a lazy fan barely swayed the mosquito netting in the children’s bedroom where I was napping, Asha offered to do a treatment on me. She brought her sisters and her assistants into the room, and they gathered around me in a circle. They began chanting and clapping and someone lit an incense with strangest scent I’ve ever smelled. Asha took hold of the top of my head and moved my body in a circle. I choked and gasped and I started to tremble. The blood rushed to my head and I screamed. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground. Someone splashed water on me. I was still shaking and I had the warmest feeling, like some dream syrup drug had pumped through all my veins. Asha told me that I was possessed with a spirit, and that I should return to Zanzibar for a full Kibuki treatment. Once I was trained in the trance, I could join the other dancers in the ring. I spent fifteen months in Zanzibar, from December of 2010 to March of 2012. I worked with a local crew to film my own kibuki treatment, and the process of learning a different culture, the sense of disorientation that comes when you move from one way of thinking to another. I was always an outsider in Zanzibar. Some beliefs and practices remain opaque. The Kibuki film treats possession as a many-sided object. You can only see part of it at one time; its shape and meaning shift with changes of light and shadow. After learning the practice and participating in it, I still cannot understand the meaning of possession. I both believe in the kibuki spirits and I don’t. The film is about that ambivalence. It is a lyrical poem that circles around the invisible creatures, spins the audience into a web, but it doesn’t offer any answers. It is for the beauty of the mystery.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 20:10:43 +0000
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