New Kyd

How can a human attempt to appropriate and create a bird song? But without irony?

How to do this?

How to become a hooded pitohui or a blackbird, perhaps even, just a symbol for one?

A true one, with sincere integrity?

The evening brings together music, dance, experimentation and political allegory. The evening moves between dance, performance art and staged unravelling. Calling in darkness, while flying as close to the light as bearable possible. Singing an ancient song while dancing in the silence of the moonlight. A lament with the entire body.



The work addresses Marcel Janco’s 1916 Dadaist designs for Chant n_— in which African and Oceanic art, poetry, and music served as important sources of inspiration. Suzanne Perrottet describes how deeply she was moved by them



The work takes the Dadaist Chant N_* as its point of departure, opening up a field of references through which it searches for new narratives rooted in Dada’s anti-war ethos—entirely in keeping with Dada’s interdisciplinary and culturally multi-perspectival spirit, and in a shared pursuit with Suzanne Perrottet of humanity and liberation. More broadly, New Kyd’s artistic method, and their play with collaged narratives and an embracing form of rebellion, can be understood as being deeply situated within the context of Dada.



Chanson Noire is inspired by “The Poet’s Inner World – Music Inspired by the Colour of Pomegranates” by Aram Bajakian

Tonight, a ritual. A story and also a lament.

Chanson Noire: The Tale of Pomegranates unfolds as a contemporary response to Chant N_—happenings entangled with the dadaist movement in 1916 in Zurich. At Cabaret Voltaire, where Dada erupted in absurdity against the logic of war, New Kyd revisits the echoes to rupture sense and rationality again, in order to find ways to survive a violent future and history.



The Dadaists were emigrants. Exiles. Anti-war bodies seeking authenticity in a collapsing Europe. Their nonsense was not frivolous—it was refusal. Marcel Janco’s poster designs for Chant N_* drew from African and Oceanic forms, staging ritual as rebellion. Kyd uses the tool of imagination to propose their own interpretation of the original task/idea of the dadaists. Kyd is inspired by the archives of Suzanne Perrottet’s work exhibited at Cabaret Voltaire and the desire that can be clearly seen in it: notes, photos, love, messiness—all colliding in expressive defiance.

This evening draws deeply from that lineage of non-rationality and shadow werk.

Kyd’s myth theory — Otherwise known as Kydology (watch this space).


Another guiding principle of the performance is the orisha who is named Oya, a Yoruba deity. A goddess of war and storms. She is an ambivalent force of the world, usually explained as having both the force of masculine and feminine energy. Her ritual dance is fierce and based upon the untameable power of nature; representing change and destruction of the old. As such she is a cleansing spirit, clearing the path for the New.



Another source of inspiration is Kyd's reading of the myth of Persephone, in which she has to dance through the underworld in order to save herself (she had been abducted by her uncle Hades, who would later wed her). After Demeter fails to get her daughter back, Hades grudgingly gives permission for Persephone to be free during Spring. However, he tricks the young goddess to eat pomegranate seeds – as the laws of the Olymp prescribe for ‘those who have tasted the food of the underworld to stay there for a part of the year’. Kyd proposes that seeing the following struggles of her daughter, God-mother Demeter is made to realise she never had been able to save herself.



The siren, a hybrid being, who sings to lure in and consume spirits who have estranged themselves from nature. Their mesmerizing songs recall the forgotten pasts rekindled by the ritualistic dances that inspire Kyd—like a spell. Their song is also an extension of the movement, for vocal chords are also part of the dance.



The fairytale: Sleeping Beauty, understood as to never be able to rest in peace. A victim of circumstance, cursed to a century of sleep by the black fairy who had been excluded for no good reason by the ruling class. The turning wheel of violence.



The last mythology is of the Jynx / wryneck bird. A bird known for being able to twist their necks by 180°. It protects itself by twitching and making snakelike movements, never confined by linear vision. It serves as a symbol of hope for hauntologists (in Kyd’s opinion at least), for it can see (like Janus) past, present and future—including the lost one