The Last International
Raqs Media Collective
Collaboration in scenography, choreography and performance with Zuleikha Chaudhari.
The Last International is a deep sea dive, head-first, into the future and into infinity.
Raqs Media Collective’s commission for Performa 2013 revives Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s idea to move the Council General of the First International Working Men’s Association to New York in 1872. Their performance-installation The Last International articulates a political aesthetics based not on petition but on proposals. The work stages debates, a wine drinking symposium on time, invokes a runaway rhinoceros, a time traveling bicycle, a conversation between a yaksha and a yakshi, as it turns mathematics and botany into poetry and creates a ruckus out of concepts, questions, symbols and totems.
Performers: Umang Bhattacharya, Gagandeep Singh, Himali Singh Soin, along with Raqs, and eight symposium participant from New York city.
Video Editing: Rajan Singh
Drummer: Ravi Makhija
The shows starts at 8:30 pm at The Connelly Theater, 220 E 4th Street, New York
Supported by +91 Foundation, Asian Cultural Council and the Frith Street Gallery. A Performa commission.
