Lafawndah & Trustfall

Artistic and stage direction: Lafawndah and Trustfall
Lyrics: Emily King and Sofia Ould Kaci (aka Chouf)
Choir: Delphine Antenor, Clémence Boisse, Lafawndah, Assia Ghendir, Jisca Kalvanda, and Nour Sirot
Voice coach: Colin Self
Staging collaborator: Lynda Rahal
Development and diffusion: Céline Peychet

Surrounded by their artistic community, the enchanting musician and producer Lafawndah and artist Trustfall present Inanna’s songbooks for the first time to the public. This piece is a working version of their future pop-chamber music creation, La Descente d’Inanna (The Descent of Inanna), freely adapted from one of the oldest Mesopotamian myths.

Work in progress from the future pop-opera created by Lafawndah and Trustfall, Inanna’s songbooks is a polyphonic performance that emerges from the twilight. Through music, it tells the story of the betrayal and reconciliation between two goddess sisters, resulting in the birth of the cycle of the seasons and a redistribution of power in the world.

Against the backdrop of the exhibition Breath of an Architect by Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai, the voices and bodies of the performers invite the public to enter the story of Inanna, the goddess of fertility and prosperity who descended into the underworld to reconcile with her sister, the goddess of the shadows, and create a new world. Between epic theater and trance-like states, this performance creates a ritual space conducive to an inner journey. The spiraling musical themes and their crystalline sounds transport the audience into an infrared and ultraviolet connection with the forgotten pasts and futures evoked by the opera. Because if this family drama with formidable consequences for humanity resonates today with the themes of ecofeminism and collective healing, the figure of Inanna is above all an unlikely guide sent to our time from a distant past.

Biographies

Lafawndah is a composer and multidisciplinary artist, based in Paris. Her musical performances have been presented at the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Venice Biennale, the Barbican, the Southbank Center in London, Bozar in Brussels, the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and the Haus Der Kunst in Berlin, amongst others. After a first EP released on the famous English record label Warp in 2016, and a first album with the German label k7! in 2019, Lafawndah released her second album The Fifth Season in 2020 with the Latency label. Here, she takes her first steps as a stage director with the new opera project, La Descente d’Inanna, co-written with Trustfall.

Brian William Rogers aka Trustfall is a musician, filmmaker, and artist based in Paris. His strongly collaborative practice incorporates composition, improvisation, cinema, and performance. His work has been presented at the Lyon Biennale, the MACBA, Ashkal Alwan, and the Festival d’Avignon, to name just a few. In 2016, he completed his PhD thesis on the avant-garde Zen operas of American artist Robert Ashley.