Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
You have the venue, the food, and a playlist nobody remembers.
Kulefri Jul is a Christmas show for the company party, and it starts with me in a very large red dress covered in baubles. One by one I take them off with a needle, because I do not need those balls any more. In Norwegian the pun does the work for me. In any language the room understands it by the second bauble, and by then everyone is laughing, including the people who came in certain that this was not their kind of evening.
Underneath the joke there is a real story about belonging, sung in many languages, and it lands warm rather than worthy. Nobody is lectured. Nobody is asked to feel guilty about anything. It simply puts a trans artist in the middle of the Christmas party and lets the night be funnier and stranger and more generous than the year the company just had.
The show does not stand beside your evening, it is shaped around it: solo, duo, or with a band, from a short spot to a full hour, and I will happily host the whole night as MC. It brings diversity into the room without a single PowerPoint slide, and it is the act people talk about the next day. Write to info@fridamarida.no
Six triggers. Three bodies. Touch a nipple, get a note.
Fri Da Nipple is built on an instrument made of skin. Six electronic triggers, four on two dancers and two on me, turn the body into the sound source of the song. Nothing plays unless someone is touched. That is not a gimmick, that is the argument: the body that gets censored is the body making the music, and you cannot hear the piece without watching it happen.
Before my transition this nipple was legal in public. After my transition, the same nipple on the same body is blurred, reported and removed. Nothing changed except how it is read. The video was filmed across my chest reconstruction in Istanbul, before and after, so the contradiction is not described, it is shown. The title is a play on my own name and on Free the Nipple, which is the only joke in a piece that is otherwise completely serious about who is allowed to be seen.
The song is out, written and composed by me, produced by Dag Henning Kalvøy. Experimental pop with Middle Eastern fusion, two minutes fifty seven. The video is directed by Sondre Holen, with Paulina Prisăcariu and Kari Karl, and it is coming.
An instrument that should not exist.
I took a real car steering wheel and rebuilt it into a live instrument. Microphones inside the rim, a kick drum that fires when I touch the metal, and I play the whole thing while I sing. It is not a prop and it is not a metaphor I hold up for the audience. It is the instrument the show is built on, and it carries thirteen languages, quarter tones, and a band that can be one person or six.
As a child in Lebanon I drove long roads pretending to be a man, because that was the only way I was allowed behind the wheel. Fri Da Roads is the rest of that story. A queer kid in Beirut during the civil war, the years of hiding, the road to France and then Norway, and the day I finally sat down in the driver's seat of my own life. It is DIY instrument building meeting political autobiography, and it is raw, funny and very loud in the places that need to be loud.
The show runs 60 to 90 minutes and scales from solo to a six piece band, with guitar and oud at its core. It was last performed at Kilden Intimscenen during Kristiansand Pride. The song it is named for, The Road, is still in the making.