Event Category: performance

The duo Beauty and the Beast (Amanda Apetrea and Halla Ólafsdóttir) who, for more than two decades, have remained a mythical force in dance are now DEAD. Or their show is. DEAD is a pornographic dystopian dance merged with poetry, music, the beauty of darkness and the in-between, seeing inner and outer realities. Exploring expressions of sexuality, body, and gender with their witchy metal aesthetic cuts gravely demon voices and surprisingly tender moments. They weaponize the power of horniness and lust. A power that they believe can move mountains. The show will practice conscious consent with the audience.

Forget Madonna, Prince, Elvis, Beyoncé, Whitney and Britney. Halla and Amanda never needed their last names and now they take on the greatest mononymes in history and blow you away.

With a soundtrack composed by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, this assemblage of dance, text, and action attempts to further an aesthetics of melancholia and alienation, not as a political inhibitor, but as a nexus where radical poetics can be justified and proliferated. The show moves beyond the politics of identification and essentialism by leaning into the undercurrent, the emotional, the motorising, the affective, the non-narrative, and the non-linear. Striving to facilitate and maximise the power of the marginal body, this solo experiments with the articulation of Black and Queer ontologies. 

Malik Nashad Sharpe is a choreographer, performer and movement director based in London, UK.

 

Different parts club dance party, introverted protest, shy popsicle concert, extreme nap time, faux fur lecture installation, and healing circle, Real Talk # 2.0 deals with erotic ecologies and opaque dramaturgies of sex. Mobilizing queer club aesthetics, pulse, traum-ah, and collaboration with the unseen as a primary mover in the space, the work asks: “In the aftermath of a rupture, how do we tend to the wound ?” Electronic House music will throb throughout the space transforming itself into a live temporal sound bath revealing subliminal messages of what is at stake for us all, again and again, alone and together.

estrella/x is a queer, Afro Guatemalan choreographer, performance artist, and healer born in New Jersey (Lenape territory) and is currently based in San Francisco (Ramaytush Ohlone territory).

Anh Vo’s fragmented and collaged multi-media works combine the terror and pleasure of erotic hauntings. Named after a 1975 mass evacuation of children from South Vietnam to the U.S., resulting in a plane crash that killed 78 of those children, BABYLIFT confronts the afterlives of the Vietnam War (a.k.a. the Resistance War Against Imperialist America). Striving to queer a linear masculinist history, Vo weaves this together with cultural memories of the Civil Rights Movement, USAmerican freedom fantasies of the 1960s, and current leftist activism.

Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer, dancer, theorist, and activist currently based in Brooklyn, NYC.

Gender Diasporist is an anti-colonial enactment of active refusal. This interdisciplinary live performance examines Tobaron Waxman’s application for Polish Citizenship as an out, transsexual person of Jewish heritage. While refusing the colonialism of the ‘law of return’ to Israel, and the inherent colonialism of Canadian citizenship, this work is simultaneously an act of solidarity with LGBTQ+ and feminist activists in Poland, who face increasing violence. Using video, photography, vocal performance and artifacts this auto-ethnographic project engages what Waxman calls ‘transsexual knowledge’, to interrogate how borders and concepts of citizenship make moral and ethical claims on bodies.

 

… and in that forest

         multitudes

multitudes of spinning planets

and in those planets

the most extraordinary lives

  of beings not yet

imagined by you …

 

empty mountain is a meditation, a filling up followed by an emptying, a layering and unlayering. A moment of rest, echo, and surrender. As an audience member, you are invited to attend part one, part two, or both. Expect slowness, spaciousness, expansion, and letting go.

Rajni Shah’s practice focuses on listening and gathering as creative and political acts. They have invited plural beings Fili Apothicaire and Ses Seçkin Kaya Çınar to make and perform with them over one year. This performance will mark the end of that year-long process.