Samir Kennedy
The Aching
2023
February 1 at 19:00
3 bis f
Performance, Video
Duration: 42 min
Book your ticket
6€ / 12€
In coproduction with 3 bis f
"The Aching is a song cycle.
The Aching is a gestural experiment.
Death as an archetypal study.
Grief as a melody.
Misery as a choreographic object.
The Aching explores the temporality of grief, the temporality of my grief"
— Samir Kennedy
In The Aching, Samir Kennedy revisits folk songs from Britain, Ireland, and the United States, lulling us into a fever dream both tender and brutal. His choreography reflects the human capacity to endure profound, unchanging sorrow. Ultimately, the artist channels his pain into creative expression, uncovering a pathway to transcendent liberation.
The performance is followed by Reunion, a new video work by Samir Kennedy and Jame St Findlay. Reunion is the result of seven days and seven nights filming their shared obsessions: death and misery, in all their absurd, horrifying, beautiful, and mundane manifestations.
Biography
Samir Kennedy is an independent artist based between London and Marseille working at the intersections between choreography, performance, sound and video.
He discovered performance through a choir concert at primary school, when a voice came out of his mouth that seemingly wasn’t his own. He quickly moved on to musical theatre, eventually finding contemporary dance where he finished his studies at Laban, UK in 2013, eventually graduating from the MA EXERCE programme at the Centre Chorégraphique Nationale de Montpellier in 2023.
Since then he has established a diverse, interdisciplinary practice, working internationally across a range of contexts and roles— as performer, choreographer, director, sound designer and dramaturg working in established theatre venues to underground, experimental spaces, clubs and galleries.
His work engages critically with themes of class, race, otherness, queerness, and abjection, centering the body as a site from which to explore and subvert the deployment of archetypal figures—such as the devil, the zombie, and the clown- he interrogates collective consciousness and cultural symbolism, using these figures as frameworks to examine intersectional identities. His approach blends aestheticized sociological markers with speculative narratives, destabilizing conventional representations and proposing alternative realities in which queer existentialism and liminal identities can be explored and reimagined. His formal interests are diverse and reflect the needs of each project but can be always understood as choreographic in their treatment of aural, visual and temporal fields.
Credits
Distribution
Creation, performance and sound: Samir Kennedy
External eye: Simon Vincenzi
Special thanks: Simon Vincenzi, Katerina Andreou, Myrto Katsiki, Anne Kezerho, Jean-Daniel Broussé, Ghyslaine Gau, Sara Manente
Support
ICI-CCN Centre Chorégraphique de Montpellier Occitanie, Tanzhaus Zürich, Battersea Art’s Centre, The Old Diorama
Photos
© Sam Coudrais
