Hymn unfolds across the festival weekend as a daily performance, developed through a week-long, POC-only collective atelier led by Fallon Mayanja in partnership with The Constant Now, a nomadic non-profit that empowers artists of color. The work integrates sound, voice, and movement, foregrounding Black and historically marginalised voices, and offering audiences an immersive experience of collective authorship.

Drawing from Detroit techno, oral archives, sonic rituals, and experimental poetry, Fallon Mayanja develops immersive performances and sound works that construct non-linear stories where sound acts as both language and space for the circulation of affects, bodies, and imaginaries. Their practice is inherently collaborative, forming transnational constellations that echo Afro-diasporic and queer speculative futures.

Hymn is a contemporary adaptation of Julius Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (1981), conceived as a collective ritual of presence and memory. Where Eastman used ten cellos to invoke Joan’s spiritual and political force, Hymn gathers ten bodies and voices, each carrying its own texture while joining a larger current, becoming living instruments.

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Through repetition, accumulation, and drift, the performance traces the connection between the individual and the collective. It summons attention and opens a space where listening becomes a force. Floating amid pulse and persistence, it creates a continuum of defiance and resonance, where sound and rhythm intertwine as acts of devotion and endurance. Hymn is neither illustration nor representation; it is an invocation, a collective insistence, a transient chorus: a call, a gathering, a convergence of recollection and reflection.

Sound structures the environment as a breathing architecture. It is both anchor and echo: the vibration of voices and bodies circulates, shaping the space and relations it holds. The work evokes not only the spirits of Eastman and Joan, but the energy of those gathered, as a vibrant constellation, in which care ripples through, composing a living communal act.

What does it mean to carry subversion, to nurture devotion? What can we express through the acts of gathering, through collective listening? Can sounding together become an act of social resilience? In Hymn, it does. This production by Fallon Mayanja is created in collaboration with The Constant Now, with production support from S.M.A.K. Moves and Flanders State of the Art.

About The Constant Now
The Constant Now is a non-profit organization, founded by artist and curator Magali Elali, that empowers artists of color through mentorship, exhibitions, projects, and talks. Operating nomadically across Belgium and beyond, it partners with institutions to reshape the artistic landscape and amplify underrepresented voices, fostering collaboration, visibility, and cross-generational dialogue.

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