EMBRACE 2024
Concept, choreography and performed by EMBRACE collective, Lydia Östberg Diakité, Adam Seid Tahir and Meleat Fredriksson.
Music by nova varnrable
Costume and Scenography by Lydia Östberg Diakité. Erlier collaboration with Aida Ramana
a living room. a sofa. screens glow but nobody is really watching.
you‘re lying down, we’re sitting and they’re fixing their hair.
secrets stop being secrets.
it's sunny outside but everyone is too tired. maybe later.
What did you say?
conversations intertwine. thoughts stuck elsewhere.
I'm sad, you're irritated, and they have a lot of energy.
everyone knows everything and nobody leaves.
In the piece EMBRACE we have explored friendship as a concept and asked questions like; What is intimacy? What does it mean to be interdependent? To choose each other and go through life together? As queer people who're part of the Afro-Nordic diaspora we’ve been interested in the idea of friendship as family, but more specifically chosen family. With a backdrop of queers being disowned by their families, parents being separated from children due to immigration policies, living as a marginalized person many times means that creating a chosen family is both a radical but also very necessary practice. This form of chosen family is built on very different grounds and terms than the grounds and terms on which biological families exist. This idea of friendship as a chosen family is at the core of what the piece EMBRACE is about.
Embrace is a collective formed by Meleat Fredriksson, Adam Seid Tahir and Lydia Östberg Diakité. The name embrace points to the basis of our collaboration, which is to embrace our existence and experiences as Afro-diasporic people in the Nordics, and how that influences the way we create art. In the experience of being part of the minority in a majority white society, during our education and professional work, we have lacked representation, recognition and the feeling of being a majority. With the choreographic collective embrace, we create Afro-postmodern performing arts in the Nordics, where we are interested in pushing the performing arts forward and developing our own artistic language.
