Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King get it just right with Losing it, their sound and dance performance exploring the experience of any war zone, thinking especially of the experience of the Gaza war and events on the West Bank. Losing it uses voice, synthesizer and about 30 feet of 3-inch wide green barricade tape stretched across a shallow stage. The performance succeeds as good esthetics and dance performance.
Potential exiles should keep it in mind as good dance performance.
In imagining how many ways a body can dance around a barricade tape, Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King get at what ought to be a home truth: separation offers no solution to conflict (even if both individuals and groups can persist a long, long, long time in a state of extreme conflict and call it living).
Haddad King shapes performance space and Wakim does performer movement. There is a natural synchronization to the piece that points to what I think must be a friendship.
“Kingdom of Noise” came to mind from the first not very loud sounds of Losing it.
I had always thought “Kingdom of Noise” one of the many traditional epithets for Hell, like “Tophet” or “Tartarus”. Nope. It’s C.S. Lewis.
It’s hard to imagine Lewis deliberately saying something sensible, so, for me, from now on, it’s Haddad King what gives “Kingdom of Noise” the sense of Hell. With a couple of whistles and squawks, she manages to create a sound composition that actually provoked in me a remembered stink of diesel exhaust, heat and frightened people. It seems to have subjugated those who do not have such memories, too.
Within the Kingdom of Noise, Samaa Wakim, a very good dancer, performs the fullness of the the non adhesive barricade tape. In space: over and around, under, over it, touching it, pressing it, bulging it, but never getting too far from or too close to [it: facing reinforced concrete blockades with matching blast-resistant agent booths]. In gesture and style: small and careful, calculated shuffle: a calibrated equilibrist, taut, always aware that the tightrope is three inches wide and sharp on both edges [and keeping in mind the kid don’t get shot up like a Swiss cheese as she is slipping off and falling the foot and half to the ground].
Given the sturdy long-lastingness of the extruded polyester of barricade tape, Wakim could very well have been dancing with the first non adhesive barrier tape ever extruded. The thing was invented in the early 1960s, just in time to rope off the path of civil rights marches – that demand for inclusion as well as an end to Jim Crow exclusion that also raised up woman rights and generally, fairness.
Perhaps a sign of quantum entanglement, in the early 1960s, my Dad had rigged up a model silicon extruder in our basement; he was a processing engineer and very keen on staying hands-on. Born in the sign of Cancer, it appears I am also a native of extrusion – like Wakim and Haddad King.
Watching Wakim turn and twist and pace so beautifully around the extruded non adhesive barricade tape, I realize that while Wakim and Haddad King have actually been born into it, non adhesive barricade tape and I have been, one way or another, cohabiting most of my adult life. Unfortunately, non adhesive barricade tape and I are unlikely to co-terminate: the ethic of separation seems to be growing from bloody strength to bloody strength.
Wakim has her barricade tape as green, as in “green line”, “Palestine-Israel”. I see that.
But, in some measure, thanks to the success of her and Haddad King’s piece, my non adhesive barricade tapes say things like “Whites Only”, “Economy Class”, “Other Passports”, “Police Line Do Not Cross”… And everybody obeys them unless somebody takes them down.
If, in the future, and think on this, if you please, a blazon is needed for our time, it could very well be “non adhesive barricade tape, per bend and bend sinister, embattled”.
Inclusion not separation is the thing we seem to want to fail at.
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I saw Losing it by Samaa Wakim et Samar Haddad King as a feature of the Festival Faits d’Hiver at Théâtre de la Bastille on 7 February 2025. Co-created, choreographed and performed by
Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King, the 7 February performance featured lighting by Cord Haldun and Music from Turathy (album Autostrad). Losing it was first produced in 2021 at Festival Theaterformen, Hanover, Germany, as part of the Goethe Institute’s 2019-2020 “Un|controlled Gestures” project.
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