Fatherless Hymn
Motherless Cacophony
Figureless Cradle 

Presentation
5 November, 2024. Nuit Blanche Toronto, produced by City of Toronto. Toronto, Canada. 

2024-ongoing. En/durational performance (12 hours), six string figures as scores, six types of onomatopoeia, six words of one chanting & six ephemeral rope installation. 

Produced by the City of Toronto 

Created & choreographed by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang
Curated by Danica Pinteric 
Performed by dearest Benjamin de Boer, Enzo Sun, Emily DiCarlo, Haleh Mir Miri, Jasmine Liaw and Yiming Cai 
Choreography consultation by Elliot Reed 
Architecture and urbanism consultation by Kii Kang & Kiwon Jeon
Documentation by ijo & Yuhan Zheng
Special thanks to Fred Moten’s words, Polen Light, Camilla Gryski 





“Fatherless Hymn, Motherless Cacophony, Figureless Cradle” (FMF) presents a live game of string figures orchestrated at Sugar Beach during Nuit Blanche. It is a tragic-comedy performance piece whose prophetic epic poem spans six acts with respective titles and geometries of string figures that desire to bring mythopoeia to the piece. FMF utilizes a thick, industrial rope to connect it to urban infrastructure and reveal its jurispathic nature at a monumental scale. Each string figure for each act is invented through reimagining transnational ethnographic archives of string figures across the globe and their semantics through which the piece dreams of storytelling, where human bodies, sweat and flesh, their labour and laborious desires for revolutions coalesce into poetic, ephemeral monuments as a tribute to those whose bodies and labour have been historically “undercommoned”. For 12 hours, performers assemble string figures, working an all-night shift and creating a series of prosodic vocal activations that seek out a universal language liberated from the human tragedy in grammar and written letters. They are the keepers of oral secrets and carriers of earthwork labour infiltrated by the social machine.”