Categories
Archive

Harald Beharie – Batty Bwoy

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

© Tale Hendnes

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.

Categories
Mediterranea France

Marina Otero – Kill Me

September 25th – 29th, 2024 Théâtre du Rond-Point, Paris
October 3rd – 4th, 2024 HAU – Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin

October 19th – 20th, 2024 Staatstheater Mainz, Mainz
October 31st – November 2nd, 2024 VIDY, Lausanne
November 5th, 2024 L’onde – Théâtre et Center d’Art, Vélizy
November 12th, 2024 teatr polski (Festival Prapremier), Bydgoszcz
November 21st, 2024 Temporada Alta, Girona
March 19th – 23rd, 2025 dansa metropolitana, Barcelona
March 26th – 29th, 2025 Les Célestins, Lyon

90 minutes

The Third Chapter of a Poignant Lifelong Project

© Sofia Alazraki

Bringing together Bach and Miley Cyrus, she creates with “Kill Me” a complete and radical work, sometimes unsettling, sometimes subversive, but always impactful.

Olivier Frégaville-Gratian d’Amore

Kill me (2024) is the continuation of Love me (2022) and Fuck me (2020), in turn it is part of the project “ Remember to live ”, in which I intend to present different versions of works until the day of my death.

Entering into the cliché of the midlife crisis, I began to film everything I did: with my heart open 24 hours a day, I recorded everything. 

Until one day I collapsed, I was given a psychiatric diagnosis and I decided to make my next piece out of it. I called on four dancers with mental disorders and Nijinsky, to make a piece that talks about madness for love. 

But let’s say that the topic is about mental health so that it enters the inclusive agenda of the art market. 

Because that is my punishment, having to make works that sell and thus stay alive in the world (of theater). 

Categories
Archive

Stefan Kaegi / Sasha Waltz & Guests – Mirror Neurons

August 29th – September 1st, 2024 radialsystem, Berlin
November 23rd – 24th, 2024, Tanz Köln, Cologne
November 28th – December 1st, 2024 Kampnagel, Hamburg
December 13th – 15th, 2024 TEATR ŁAŹNIA NOWA, Kraków
80 minutes

A Documentary Dance Evening with an Audience

© Bernd Uhlig

This piece is an experiment, conducted anew in every performance. It revolves around the human brain and its relationship with the body. The audience is an essential part of the experiment, because its members are invited not only to watch the dancers but also to find their own groove, to participate from their seats as an active part of a collective system, and to feel the sensation of belonging to a vast hive brain.

Spiegelneuronen (Mirror Neurons) marks the first joint project with Sasha Waltz & Guests. Following on from Andrew Schneider’s remains in 2020, this project continues the dance company’s openness to new styles as well as its commitment to broaden its repertory through artistic exploration and interdisciplinary cooperation with international artists. The collectives come from markedly different artistic directions, but are equally interested in the unconventional use of space and in interdisciplinary work. In this first collaboration, Stefan Kaegi will join forces with both the dancers from Sasha Waltz & Guests and the audience for an exploration of the relationship between the individual and society, conducted through the medium of dance in front of a large mirror.

Categories
Archive

Eisa Jocson & Venuri Perera – Magic Maids

September 20th – 22nd, 2024 HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin
October 4th – 6th, 2024 Esplanade, Singapore
October 11th – 12th, 2024 Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna
80 minutes

Two Figures Engaged in the Ritual Act of Sweeping

© National Gallery Singapore

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.