ULYSSES CO-COMMISSION: Alexander Khubeev at Ultima

Don’t leave the room! Let furniture keep you company,
vanish, merge with the wall, barricade your iris
from the chronos, the eros, the cosmos, the virus.

These lines from Joseph Brodsky’s iconic poem Don’t Leave the Room set the tone for Nadar Ensemble’s latest project: a performance about seclusion, resistance, and political fear. Through music, sign language, film and poetry, the ensemble gives voice to private revolts, whispered refusals, and utopian worlds.

In Alexander Khubeev’s Don’t Leave the Room, Brodsky’s poem is signed, not spoken – powerful silence framed by a charged, dystopian sound world for this ULYSSES commission.

Also in the programme, Iranian composer Golnaz Shariatzadeh weaves animation and music into a love poem to a wounded city. In her piece Blue Womb, two sibling-creatures seek refuge by entering each other’s bodies. The Chorus by Abbas Kiarostami shows an old man muting the city’s noise by turning off his hearing aid, thus missing his granddaughter’s call. Silence as a refusal to hear the next generation. And behind it all looms the legacy of Galina Ustvolskaya: a composer who barely left her room, yet whose music – once suppressed – still strikes with unforgiving force.

Don’t Leave the Room gathers works shaped by fear, courage, and isolation. It makes space for gestures that cannot be silenced, even when they go unheard.

Programme

Abbas Kiarostami The Chorus – short movie (1982)

Golnaz Shariatzadeh Blue Womb (2025) for ensemble, electronics and animation (Norwegian premiere)

Alexander Khubeev Silentium! (2025) for solo performer, ensemble, electronics and live video (Norwegian premiere)

Read more