NO MERCY navigates our daily virtual and non-virtual modes of feeling. During this 45-minute DJ set, nasa4nasa explores the limits of sensuality and desire interplaying with violence. The two female bodies navigate the gaze, referencing their repertoires of body image, pop, rage and intimacy. nasa4nasa will lure you in, disarm you and in the process unravel in their own drama.
nasa4nasa is a dance collective based in Cairo co-founded by dancers Noura Seif Hassanein and Salma AbdelSalam in 2016. Housed primarily on Instagram, the collective’s work explores image-making and online presence as their ongoing dance practice. nasa4nasa’s debut performance SUASH premiered at Next Festival and MDT (2018). They were most recently awarded the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture for their latest work Sham3edan (2023).
September 20th – 22nd, 2024 HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin October 4th – 6th, 2024 Esplanade, Singapore October 11th – 12th, 2024 Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna 80 minutes
Interweaving ritual, pageantry, performance and possession, Magic Maids presents an encounter with two figures engaged in the ritual act of sweeping. The broom, a domestic tool for cleaning and the vehicle of the witch, becomes a symbol of both oppression and resistance. It is an extension of the body and a portal for metamorphosis. The art workers and their brooms exist in a continuous state of becoming.
Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera are from the Philippines and Sri Lanka respectively, two countries known for their significant export of domestic workers. Their collaboration began in 2022 when they noticed the absence of women at Basel Museum of Pharmaceutical History in Switzerland. This observation sparked their investigation of the historical persecution of witches; in Europe and its implications for the exploitation of female labour in colonised regions. They discovered that the accusation of witchcraft continues to be a tool for persecuting migrant workers from the Global South.
Magic Maids is a bodily response to their grappling with these complex entanglements. They call upon practices of incantation and intention, using their bodies to traverse multiple territories: physical, conceptual, transnational, emotional, and gendered. The labour in performance enables an embodied inquiry into questions of representation, political subjecthood and histories of oppression. Having individually presented solo work across international festivals and platforms that follows this line of inquiry, Jocson and Perera come together for the first time to sweep out and unsettle oppressive power structures. Rewilding the domestic, they aim to release, reclaim, rejoice, and reconnect with the primal energies.
Magic Maids is an invitation to witness and reflect on the visibility of the working body, the power of female solidarity, and the enduring impact of historical injustices on modern labour practices.
ONE DROP is a speculative summoning, a decolonial dream, an autopsy of the Western stage and an operetta. Slipping in meanings, leaking through different categories the work dives into the poetics and politics of relations, creating a stage that awakens the ghosts, connections lost or forgotten.
The title of the work refers to two separate frameworks, the one drop rhythm which is a reggae style drum beat as well as to the one drop rule of the Race Separation Act, created in the United States in the early 1900s, according to which a single drop of “Black blood” made a person “Black” despite their appearance. Through its multiple starting points the work interrogates the ghosts of the Western stage and its entanglements and relationalities to capitalism, coloniality and modernity.
ONE DROP continues Lindfors’ series of works dealing with power, representation and Black body politics.
In the upcoming edition of the PARIYESTAN-multiverse – a series of durational collective dream meditations – we will focus on slow, dreamy choreography accompanied by recitations of traditional persian poetry and classical live music, this time specifically around the topics of sisterhood and motherland. sisterhood is embraced in the form of resistance. a gathering of sisters dreaming together in languages they don’t understand. they share artistic expressions freely while creating a monument in time together. through slowness, love and trust, they are powerfully exploring other possibilities of co-existing.
Parisa Madani // PSORIASIS (RIP) aka B1txx3$k?llah*fka the Persian Princis from the Gorgeous House of Gucci and the Iconic Hall of Fame Kiki House of Juicy Couture بھ پاریستان خوش آمدید Pillow Talk say ha name – the story of a long-nailed german-iranian woman of trans* experience with sharp green eyes working with live arts and the communities. in the last four years, the collective has released live and digital art on their website, a mini album (pariyestan on soundcloud). it has also started the multiverse of collective dream meditations through collaborations with international artists and shown in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal and Italy. inspired by ancient persian mythologies and spiritualities, the immersive performances create spaces of worship and resistance; especially for those of non-white, neurotypical, queer & trans communities and others who are underserved by traditional and conservative legislations. in the future she might lead a spiritual revolution, tour the world as a secret popstar with big tits and/or meditate inside volcanoes until the end of time.
In this work, the dancers change their forms from moment to moment, just like the flickering light, the changing weather, or the evolving plants and animals. Through the interaction of these different forms, the boundaries between seemingly opposing concepts, such as life and death, the ancient and the future, as well as harmony and chaos, are explored. Eventually, the stage, where even the boundary between information and matter has become blurred, will become a place of transformation.
Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa aim to depict the unknown landscape that lies beyond.
Drawing inspiration from a wildlife documentary series he watched as a child, Tao Ye observes striking parallels between the intricate movements of animals in nature and the vast repertoire of human motion. Co-curated with Fan Xi, The World of Movements – When Body Language Comes Alive showcases for the first time the TAO Dance Theater 2 in the gallery of Renzo Piano-designed contemporary art museum By Art Matters in Hangzhou, China.
The exhibition features more than 20 dancers from diverse backgrounds performing in a setting of everyday furnishings, where they improvise continuously. Visitors can immerse themselves, either passively or actively, creating their own journey that interweaves familiarity with imagination, reconsidering how human bodies form connections.
At first, the goal is to present a thick, dense, and fibrous substance by choreographing a clustering of bodies. The dancers, spread horizontally, glide on the floor and over each other. Then, to make visible the moment when, after being pressed against each other, they detach, much like their internal bodily masses gradually engage in opposite directions. They start to move apart, to differentiate, moving in opposite directions while still constantly linked. Their dance mostly unfolds on the ground. The group’s tightening and expansions allow its movement: each contraction followed by an expansion into a new space. Together, they shape pneumatic volumes, making them palpable. They unfold with determination and gentleness through the notions of direct space (moving from one point to another by the shortest path), sustained time, and lightness of weight.
Finally, the group develops a more vaporous material: the treatment of space, which was direct in the previous phase, becomes indirect (movement from one point to another is curved and sinuous). A floating quality, conducive to resonance, sets in. The seven dancers are always in contact; the group moves and changes shape, but now, it remains expansive, and the dancers invest both horizontal and vertical space. Together, they float, they wander through the meanders of a labyrinth (each one’s inner bodily space and the group’s space). Inhabited by the light and elastic roundness of sacro-cranial vibrations, their volume encompasses the labyrinth; they move through its passages, savoring the thickness of each moment, the eternity of dilated time.
To mark ARTONOV’s tenth anniversary, dancer-choreographer Akaji Maro, a living butoh legend, meets virtuoso cellist Eric-Maria Couturier, soloist with the Ensemble intercontemporain, for an original performance.
Based on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suites, the butoh dancer and the musician dialogue and improvise, in a radical staging that transcends historical periods, cultural areas and artistic genres.
With a narrative based on the development of a human being, the performance explores with intensity the notions of identity, in all their ambiguity and contradictions.
A powerful and harmonious encounter between two strong, original personalities at the peak of their art.
Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the most iconic classical ballet score, first staged in Paris in 1913, meets Bharatanātyam, one of India’s best-known traditional classical dances. Seeta Patel, a choreographer of Indian origin based in England and now an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells in London, with her The Rite of Spring offers a bridge between Europe and Asia, a place where prejudices are overcome to leave room for a hymn to life realised by a perfect interweaving of dance and music.
A dialogue with the choreographer is planned at the end of the performance.
The Rite of Spring was nominated in the Best New Dance Production category at the 2024 Laurence Olivier Awards.
Georgina Philp, known in the ballroom world as Legendary Trailblazer Mother Leo St. Laurent, invites you to the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum for an unforgettable evening full of glitz and glamour. At the Pump Into The Future Ball, the Ruhrtriennale will celebrate ballroom and its outstanding performers on the runway. A range of houses and participants will show off their talents in front of an international jury and compete with each other in classical ballroom categories to take home one of the coveted trophies.
Ballroom culture originated in the USA, where it was invented in New York in the 60s/70s by Black and Latinx trans women. Ballroom was introduced to Germany by Mother Leo with a first ball at the Berlin Voguing Out Festival in 2012. That same year she also founded the first local ballroom house, which was known at the time as the House of Melody.
To coincide with the Pump Into The Future Ball, Georgina Philp will also meet international icons of the ballroom scene for a panel talk about ballroom. In addition to the panel talk, there will also be workshops on voguing and runway given by the ballroom community.
