Ahead of their evening performance, Ian Mugerwa aka Dawuna, presents a screening of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (ranked among the ten best films of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound Critics Poll) and talks about how the film relates to the visual side of their project.

Dawuna
Dawuna is a multi-disciplinary artist hailing from the DMV. His art reinterprets moments in the Black American musical cannon via avant-garde compositional methods. This can result in anything from an experimental rap album to a straight-up funk album. His debut, Glass Lit Dream, was hailed as a "masterpiece" by The Guardian, and received much critical acclaim.

Beau Travail
With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant (Denis Lavant) sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit (Grégoire Colin) plays out to the thunderous, operatic strains of Benjamin Britten. Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard fold military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema.

Framed Listen
Framed Listen is a series in which artists across a wide spectrum of genre and sonic palette are asked to curate visual material that contextualizes their music practice. Each evening of the series is based around a different artist, opening with a screening and concluding with a performance. The series aims to highlight and expand engagement with different forms of experimental music, giving attendees a deeper look into the work of these extraordinary musicians.