MARAN is a performance by Amina Seid Tahir, staged for an audience lying down around her. In a dark, misty room, she moves to the rhythm of bells braided into her hair, then sits before her krar, an Eritrean lyre, and plays. Its strings carry songs of resistance alongside soft, lulling melodies. The sounds call the room to rest and to dreams, to water seeds for new worlds to grow. The work rereads the Nordic figure of the Maran, the night visitor whose name gave us the word nightmare, turning the bringer of bad dreams into their protector.

The krar is a five or six stringed lyre with a long political history in Eritrea, used to set resistance songs against the regime and as a source of power for the country’s resistance movements. Its vibrations are also said to heal, and the instrument has long featured in healing ceremonies. Under the Derg regime it was banned outright and branded a devil’s instrument, precisely because it had become a symbol of marginalised resistance.

The Maran, in Nordic folk belief, sat on men’s chests at night, pressed the air from them and filled them with dread. From her name grew the word mardröm, nightmare. Tahir reads her anew, through a queer Afro-Nordic lens, asking what the Maran does when she visits her own community. Here she moves among sleeping bodies not to weigh them down but to watch over them, the krar in her hands, the once feared curse now the protector of the dream.