Mossa
Curiel de Buildner's IHOT
see full-length poster below!
INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF TRANCES
will be performing at the Knitting Factory in the Main Space
October 24th at 8:00 pm.
Tickets are $ 12.00. http://www.knittingfactory.com/.
The essential idea for IHOT stems from Artistic Director Mossa Bildner's awareness that the Afro-Brazilian trance inducing music she experienced during her formative years in Rio De Janeiro, and the Gnawa trance music she experienced later in life in Morocco, are directly related. This idea makes sense historically: in the 15th century West African captives who were taken across the Sahara to serve as slaves in Marrakesh, Meknes, and Fez, came from the same region of Africa as those who one hundred years later, were taken by Portuguese slavers to Bahia, in the north of Brazil. Both groups of West African slaves saw their native music mutated by the influences of their new environment, on the one hand by the Berbers, and the other, by Portuguese secular and religious music. Thus, Candomble from Bahia and Gnawa from Marrakesh are brothers under the musical skin; they naturally share not only rhythmic and percussive elements, but also similar characteristics in the identity of the sprits and gods their music evokes.
Most importantly, both musical traditions share the same goal: to attain the state of trance, i.e. possession by spirit (gods) common to both cultures, representing the desire to nullify the self and merge with a universal consciousness. This urge is a constant thread that runs through all mystical cultures, and which surfaces in our particular time in a secular, demystified form, as Ambient and House music.
Today, under the same smog-filled sky of
New York City, we have resident Gnawas, practitioners of Candomble, and
high priests of House, all separately striving to perform their ritual
of music and dance in the isolated venues accorded to them. IHOT
will unify these spiritual, musical, and technological forms in one performance
work, to create a millennial trance event.
Mossa Curiel
de Buildner, a Sephardi native of Brazil, is a member of NASAWI.
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