The play relies on the notion of “ugliness” and on the act of savagery. It proposes a redefinition of savagery in a time of crisis. While questioning the archetype of ugliness through a collection of narratives, masks and images, the play floats over historical and contemporary drama productions. In the subgenre of horror films, the Zombie is an antagonist, an infected human, rotten and ugly! It is a creature that threatens humans with its infection. In One Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights, The Ghoul is a fearsome creature, who floats between life and death, again, an ugly creature.

It threatens the king. In drama productions of zombie films and Arabian Nights, Zombies and the Ghoul are considered ugly antagonists with monstrous bodies, while the perfect human is the protagonist who gets rid of those creatures. Both dramas emphasize the ugly body as an antagonist who deserves to be killed.

Through the models of Zombies and of the Ghoul, the play imagines a possible mode of existence in times of perpetual crisis. Through a dark edition of A Thousand and One Nights the project thinks through an hypothesis [if savagery is a mode of resistance, how can we contemplate its aesthetic?].

1 - Oh, I Am So Sorry! I Didn’t Mean To Scratch Your Face

The Lyrics/text written by Mohamed Abdelkarim
The sound performance by Brian Cole 
The Poster designed by Engy Mohsen 
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The written/spoken lyric contemplates and problematizes the post-planetary supposition toward future disaster speculation. The Lyric is skeptical toward such a hypothesis of one global threat that prevents any geographical, social-psychological particularities.
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How do we call things by their names?

When I float all over the subjects, I dive into the languages I speak. 
They call it decolonization; I call it a safe place. 

The colony of cells is occupied by a different microbe. 
The opponent vanquishes the weak. 

When a disaster hits, everybody has to move. 
The safe place is where technology exists in the form of a hegemonic groove. 

Technologies are relative depending on where you are. 
We live the same Cyberpunk means, but each of us has their own narrative 
I call it a particular narrative, that is what I got so far. 

Particular has nothing to do with particularity. 
Geography, language, gender, class, and skin are principles. 
You call it Internationalism; I call it dissimilarity. 

Now I share with you some issues, and I keep the rest to myself. 
I make efforts to find common ground. 
Colonialism pops up in the shape of planetary solutions. 
Do you like how this sounds?

'Modernity means many things, and its arrival and progress can be traced using many and different markers' (1) 

Listen to what I am seeing. 
I am telling a sound of fiction, and I see reality. 
It might get darker.
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(1) -  Bauman, Z. (2018). Liquid modernity. Polity Press.

Mohamed Abdelkarim

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