Jessika and Jimmy Khazrik
No Doubt Nisaba (2023)
Jessika and Jimmy Khazrik, No Doubt Nisaba (2023), performance, photo: steirischer herbst / Clara Wildberger
Photo: Robert Sieg
What if our memories were born before we were born, and we get to witness, time and time again, a call-and-response between our ancestral myths, transpersonal experiences, and contemporary science? In their musical contribution to herbst cabaret, Jessika and Jimmy Khazrik revisit matriarchal tales of love, exile, and ecstasy indigenous to the multimillennial literature and oral transmissions of their Chaldo-Assyrian ancestry. Taking the form of a stellar cabaret ritual with a multiplicity of voices performed by a granddaughter, a father, and an immaterial mother, the divisive materiality of time collapses as an illusion. The audience is warmly invited to join this endless search for transgenerational healing through interludes delving into the body’s organs of perception.
Jamal Jimmy Khazrik (1952, Baghdad, Iraq) has been a pioneer of the Lebanese nightlife scene for over fifty years, bringing people together in hybrid forms of storytelling. He began as a promoter of underground Armenian rock bands in 1960s Beirut, before becoming renowned in the 1970s and 1980s as a vocal jazz singer, club founder, and organizer under the moniker Jimmy Blue Bird. After a thirty-three-year hiatus as a musician, he has returned to performing in 2022 together with his daughter Jessika. His new work mixes vocoding and techno with stellar sci-fi stories ruminating on clubsʼ templar potential.
Jessika Khazrik (1991, Beirut, Lebanon) is an artist-composer, technologist, educatress, and DJ whose live musical practice is devoted to communal solace, collective transcendence, and transgenerational healing. Her sets are informed by ancestral chanting traditions skewed by quaint techno and incomputable, entrancing rhythms. Performing and exhibiting internationally in a wide range of venues from clubs to museums, theaters, and quarries, she uses spaces of congregation to search for locally entrenched universalisms that could collectively respond to the dystopias of our times.
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ʼ23
30.9., 1.10., 20:00
Forum Stadtpark (basement)
Stadtpark 1
8010 Graz ♿
18/14 euros per evening
Duration: 45 min.
In English
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ʼ23
