Bwagamoyo: World Script Premiere, June 3

For every living creature that is male nine are sacrificed...the bodies are hung in a grove near the temple in Uppsala.
-- Adam of Bremen, German Church historian, 1070

I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil. All experimentation implies great risk.
--Ingmar Bergman, legend of modern cinema, born and raised in Uppsala

The most telling - and compelling - line of a man's body is that where his neck meets his shoulder.
-- Shailja Patel, Bwagamoyo:The Father

What does the tortured masculinity of Ingmar Bergman have to do with Kenya's post election-violence?

How do Nordic myths of male sacrifice gyrate the hips of small brown boys in colonial Zanzibar?

And why do the ancient burial mounds of Old Uppsala evoke Obama's economic vulture, Paul Volcker?

Find out on June 3rd, at the historic Slottsbiografen, Uppsala, Ingmar Bergman's first cinema.

I will deconstruct nine chokeholds of masculinity, with flashing blades of poetry.
Ritually hang them.
Then resurrect them with a song of redemption.

It's going to be unforgettable. A high-wire risk-taking experimental performance / staged reading, that Bergman would approve of. There may even be real blood.

It's the world script premiere of Bwagamoyo: The Father, the second movement in the four-part epic journey of Migritude.

If you're anywhere within reach of Uppsala, you don't want to miss this. It'll never happen again, this way, in this particular space, so charged with significance, history, and power. It's not a show. It's a one-time creative event that you can be a part of.

Details on venue and time on my Calendar.

Presented by the Uppsala University Summer Symposium of Literature and Theory and Nordiska Afrikainstitutet Cultural Images Program.