Dafne Phono by Nour Mobarak

Nour Mobarak’s Dafne Phono is an adaptation of the first opera, La Dafne, composed and written by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598. Drawing on the myth of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—a story of unrequited love, patriarchal possession, conquest, and transformation—the opera and Mobarak’s multimedia and multispecies reimagining splinters the opera’s Italian libretto, which is translated into some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages—Abkhaz, San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, Silbo Gomero, and !Xoon—alongside English and Greek versions. In the process, the narrative—and an artifact of Western culture—are dismantled, metabolized, and rendered into unruly utterances that shape the sensorium as much as they do the capacity for sense-making. These voices are given material form by a cast of mycelium sonic sculptures whose rhizomatic compositions and broadcasted recordings resemble the formation and mutation of language over time, reconstituting speech into a new, polyphonic body politic, composed of voices whose striking, poetic utterances transfix and transcend meaning.