The eye of the cyclops is round ‒ like the lens of a camera. Whoever controls the eye rules!
In his directorial debut at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Zé de Paiva merges all of his experiences as an actor, dancer, photographer and video artist. In an intermedial performance he and the dancer Nasheeka Nedsreal seek to distort the postcolonial configuration of images.
They came out of curiosity, for the city held a promise. Some sought refuge here from the violence of patriarchal societies, because Berlin offered them freedom — the possibility of reinventing themselves on their own terms. Or was it those who came who created this city of promise? In Amigues Adios by Bishop Black, five performers embark on a search for Berlin’s promise, for the freedom of being together beyond the conservative boundaries of sexual identity and racial identity.
In Into the Chronosphere, Sisi Bo’wale and his team weave together performance, music, poetry and psychedelic imagery into a tongue-in-cheek, queer, Afrofuturist collage. At its heart are questions about the meaning of time and the protagonists’ attempt to free it from its colonial linearity, driven by the logic of exploitation.
In her third book, Alice Hasters examines the evolution of the term “victim” and the resulting shift in public discourse. Increasingly, the word “victim” no longer refers to people who have suffered injustice, but to those who are seen as disrupting harmony, being overly sensitive, bringing others down or trying to assert superiority over them. Hardness towards others is increasingly regarded as desirable. And while victims are held to impossibly high standards, powerful alliances rooted in patriarchal complicity are making our world a worse place.
The body is the medium for entering ever new worlds. The body is suppressed, the body is free. Natasha Vergilio’s art consists of using the centrifugal force of her own body movement to push forward into new spaces, for herself and for others – now she is showing Gira, her portrait performance at Ballhaus Naunynstraße!
Based on his experience of growing up in Berlin in the 1980s and 90s, dancer and choreographer Raphael Moussa Hillebrand attempts to shape his own life experience so that the next generation and his own child can pick up on it.
In Arrival of the Village, documentary choreographer Magda Korsinsky and her team set out in search of transformed relationships — because the old model of the heteronormative nuclear family produces roles that often isolate, exhaust or create dependency. Recognition, desire, self-determination and equality fall by the wayside. And how can one be a role model when so much feels wrong? How can we expand our notions of family and live out collective care, shared responsibility and mutual empowerment?