Blue Gaze at The Future: Designing the Unseen
*An iteration featuring an Intervention by Fay
Performance, 40 minutes, 2024
Blue Gaze at the Future is a series of audiovisual performances combining text, radio drama, and visuals. It questions the theater stage as a landscape that can reorder fractured reality, proposing a different world. The performance follows the legend of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma, known for her clairvoyance, tracing her appearances in literature post-1948. It explores future hope amidst grief and defeat. In this second episode, the desert is the focus — both as a physical and metaphorical landscape — considering how it can be staged scenographically.
Through the legend of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma, a woman who lived in the pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula and was known for her exceptional intuition, sharp eyesight, clairvoyance, and ability to predict events before they occurred, the performance traces and contemplates her apparitions in contemporary literature following events in 1948, 1967, 2013, and beyond. It explores how we can imagine a future hope that copes with grief and reconciles defeat, considering notions of negativity, grief, and defeat as rational apparatuses rather than psychic affects.