Bari – Dancephere

The World of Dating Apps

Welcome to an underground digital grid: the world of dating apps. A figure—a speed model—jumps from one profile to another, from one body to another, canceling the distance but continuously looking for a way out. Loneliness, sexual drive, alienation, or simple interaction: which instinct pushes you to choose the closest profile?

GRNDR_Date no one investigates the dating app phenomenon. Apart from being addictive, the use of sex-dating apps affects our way of perceiving the other, their body and their presence, consequences that intertwine with the new human and social relation dynamics. The work is characterized by poses and mutations, in which the body changes, showing the most desirable piece.

Through the screen, the subject is exposed and vulnerable: an anonymous figure shows the best parts of themselves. The identity is irrelevant when the body details are more important, and all that can be demanded is to reach an instant pleasure when all that one might want to sweeten the sense of loneliness is just a few steps away.

Andrea Zardi is an Italian dancer, choreographer and researcher. He trained at Hamlyn Ballet School, Nuova Officina della Danza, Tanzfabrik, Eko Dance Project and National Dance Foundation and worked for national companies and theatres. He obtained a PhD in Performing Arts Disciplines at the University of Turin. In 2018, he founded the ZA DanceWorks company, with whom he deals with artistic planning and curatorship in Italy and Europe. Currently, he is a research associate at the University of Turin.

November 16th – 17th, 2024 Bari International Gender festival, Bari
November 21st – 23rd, 2024 Sophiensæle, Berlin
December 6th – 7th, 2024 Kampnagel, Hamburg
75 minutes

A Captivating Solo

There are hints of dancehall dutty wine whirls, or sexy pelvis swaying. The movements are always ambivalent: they range between vulnerable, violent and ecstatic, yet become mechanical and ‘empty’ through numerous repetitions.
Jelena Mihelčić

Batty Bwoy is a solo performance in collaboration with Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, Jassem Hindi and Ring van Mobius.

Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “ Batty Bwoy” (litteraly, butt boy), slang for a queer person, the work twists and turns myths to invoke demonic sensitivities and charming cruelties, unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety. The horror and joy of Batty Bwoy, inherent to queer blackness, is unmasked.

Scrutinizing the absurdity of a queer monstrosity, Batty Bwoy articulates the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the corporal fictions projected onto their skins.

Batty Bwoy attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body as a perverse and deviant figure. The expression “Batty Bwoy” is used to evoke an ambivalent being that exists in the threshold of the precarious body, liberated power, joy and batty energy!

The work has found inspiration in mythologies, disgusting stereotypes, feelings and fantasies of the queer body and identities, homophobic dancehall lyrics, 70s Giallo films from Italy, resilient “gully queens” and queer voices in Norway and Jamaica that have visited and taken part of the process.

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