On the streets of Brazil, along the paths of Tunisia, among other road users in Senegal, between the houses of Kolkata: sounds and voices, songs and proverbs meet the body, pass through it, transform it, merge, and re-emerge in an altered form. What is identity?

Benjamin Abras is a multidisciplinary artist, equally at home in visual art, poetry, and the performing arts. At the centre of all his work is the body – the Black body – its capacity for perception and expression. With over twenty years of dance experience with residencies and performances across four continents, Benjamin Abras has developed a unique bodily language: Afro Butoh.

Collected fragments of sound and voice accumulate on and within the body. In resonance with the legacy of his father and his philosophical tools, they transform and, in turn. And they transform the bodily language, until the performer becomes like a book, carrying the extraordinary stories of his journeys. He becomes a nexus of multiple presences: he dances the voices that inhabit his own voice, creating an endless spiral of memories. He celebrates oral culture and its physicality, where the ancestors constantly whisper; he evokes poetry and summons resilience. For the Black body is less a site of “fixed identity” than a crossroads of other possibilities.

In KALUNDU, Benjamin Abras is accompanied by Lucas Sevaux and his electronic soundscapes. As part of the festival Black Berlin Black – Festivity, KALUNDU will be presented for the first time in Germany.