Fires can be deafening: so loud they drown out our voices if not our thoughts. To reclaim our oral organs, Bajura i pióra aims to rekindle the flamboyance of the flame via a winged creature known as Simurgh. For Festiwal Łódź Wielu Kultur, we turn to the mythical bird found across the Eurasian landmass, from China westwards to somewhere in northern Ukraine near Chernihiv. Often depicted as female but whose gender is essentially indeterminate, Simurgh is on fire. Not figuratively, we mean literally and discursively flaming, non-binary, and wholly of the next world.

That you can find the eagle at your local gas station makes perfect sense: it is after all the lazy mascot of toxic masculinity, perenially pumped-up on steroids (where are ye, effeminate, girly, emo eagles?). To find Simurgh, you’ll need to travel just a bit further down the road, over to the next world, the imaginal one, where black and white, left and right are currencies with no legal tender.

From pole-dancers to tea-ceremonies, performances about pigeons to a nail salon, Bajura i pióra brings together artists, musicians, dancers and designers whose work offers us a way of being together which is outrageous. Not in anger or vitriol, but in expressive exuberance, like the Simurgh and its fiery tale.

When things burn, they lose mass, become thinner, narrower, until they cease to be altogether. The regime of identity politics has whittled each of us down to a scrawny stick figure, inflammable but too meager to keep anyone or anything warm. It’s not the hyphens (Polish-Punjab, Latvian-Lur, Belgian Buryiat) which make us more muscular, resilient or burn brighter. If anything, hyphens are a clumsy attempt to add some much needed bulk to our bony selves. We who identify not as he/she/they but as hyphen and em-dash, more exposed and thus more fragile. Punctuated peeps reveal (and too often, revel in) the knee of our various destinies, the joint where it could all go wrong, the weak spot of our miscellaneous me’s.

Slavs and Tatars & Michał Grzegorzek