MAGNUNA 1: Hayyuna (2022)
Live performance, 14 minutes 54 seconds

Hayyuna (ha-yu-na) is the first performance in the research, lexicon and performance project MAGNUNA means madwoman in Arabic, a research, lexicon and performance project (2020-present).

It is based on the figure of Hayyuna al-Majnuna (“Mad Hayyuna”), a Sufi mystic who lived in 10th-century Iran.

The only surviving trace of Hayyuna’s life appears in al-Naysaburi’s Wise Madmen written between 1015–16 AD. Across five brief lines, a woman emerges who oscillates between ecstatic rapture and profound suffering. She was a familiar, flickering presence in Souk al-Haddadin (the Blacksmith Market), where she was seen skipping and singing to the hammering of metal on anvils. Her song, “Ya malek la-a’oud” (“My Lord, I do not go back”), became a kind of spontaneous hymn, a testament to irreversible devotion, to having crossed a threshold from which no return was possible. The image of Hayyuna moving lightly through a world of brutal material labor, her voice rising against the clangor of iron, captures the essence of holy madness: a spirit seized by divine attraction, yet tethered to the harshest textures of earthly life.

In MAGNUNA, Hayyuna is reimagined as an archetype: the luminous trace of an unnamed, forgotten transmission of mystical energy. The performer moves in widening and narrowing circles, spiraling inward toward the center of the pattern, tracing a path between ecstasy and disappearance. The choreography becomes a ritual of return, a disciplined unraveling of form into radiant presence.

MAGNUNA 1: Hayyuna is performed by Noura Seif, and commissioned by the Bergen Academy for Art and Design.

(Based on the lexicon entry “Hayyuna”. See full annotation here)