Performance Situation Room Amsterdam 2017
In 2015 Bâtard Festival Brussels first migrated to Amsterdam. In 2017 it did so again on the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th of November - it traveled from Beursschouwburg in Brussels to Veem House for Performance in Amsterdam.
The festival has a reputation: it always shows radical, daring and outspoken work by emerging performance artists, who suprisingly often pop up at international dance and performance festival in the years after.
'Bâtard' means 'bastard'. But it also stands for hybrid, for raw and cutting edge work. The title can never do justice, since Bâtard, just like the work it presents, will always try to work around labels and categories and rather questions those labels instead.
What we can say is that in 2017 again Bâtard showed twelve outspoken works in Brussels and Amsterdam. And that in both cities, the work will be varying from dance to cinema.
#day1 - 8th November - program starting: 19:00
Ogutu Muraya | Because I Always Feel Like Running
In Because I always feel like running, Ogutu Muraya navigates the phenomenon and politics of running. In East Africa, the emergence of athletic prowess in middle and long distance categories coincided with the independence movements. Since the 60s the success of athletes became tied with the process of nation building and the creation of a new identity in a postcolonial context.
- soup break -
Caroline Creutzburg | Nerve Collection
Nerve Collection is a contemplative-pamphletic solo; a stroll in the status quo. Caroline Creutzburg grows a sensory thorn that records her empathies and her intolerances. She proceeds like a spy within her own nervous system: Through inconspicuous behavior she remains undetected to herself and is yet able to trace every detail.
#day2 - 9th November - program starting: 19:00
Ruben Desiere | Kosmos
Impressive documentary with fictional elements that stays close to the characters and their environment. Roma Kevin Mroc and his family's struggles - threatened by eviction from their squatted home - are freely combined with the story Kosmos by Witold Gombrowicz.
or Margo van de Linde | Improvised Feminism
"I am a feminist. I think. But sometimes when I end up in a conversation that makes me want to say those words; I don’t. At a certain point I started to wonder - why? And also - If I’m finding this a difficult subject to approach, how must that be for other people and what could I, as a theatre maker, do to make this conversation accessible and engaging?" With Improvised Feminism Margo creates an alternative space for learning together.
- soup break -
Anne-Lis Le Gac & Élie Ortis | Le Grand Mal
It starts with a collection of non-professional dance videos found on the internet. They are called Danses Glocales. The collection has become a Conversation between Elie Ortis and Anne Lise le Gac. Most of the time, it happens "online", because Elie lives in Paris and Anne Lise in Marseille. Material is gathered with joy / shamelessly and the conversation is set to be shared with an audience, from time to time. You are with two solitudes.
#day3 - 10th November - program starting: 19:00
Jaha Koo | Cuckoo
Jaha Koo experienced isolation for himself one day when his electric rice cooker’s speech function informed him that his meal was ready – in “Cuckoo”, rice cookers are now his only co-actors. Supported by the hardware hacker Idella Craddock, he transforms several rice cookers into speaking performers. Together with them, he takes us on a journey through the last six hundred years of Korean history, combining personal experiences with political events and food cultures with world views. In bitter-sweet, humorous dialogues, Jaha Koo and his smart devices sum up technological progress and human inadequacies: if even the theatre stage doesn’t need human beings any more, where else are actors supposed to earn their bowl of rice?
- soup break -
Oneka Von Schrader | She
SHE is a solo performance exploring multiple - female - manifestations of spirituality. SHE is a down to earth, but celestial dialogue; a research in close collaboration with spiritual books, Youtube and dark spaces. SHE is an introduction into [DIY-urban shamanism], a concert of [the holy spirits], a dialogue with the audience’s inner spiders and possibly a [healing chant].
- break -
Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen | Slow Reading Club
Slow Reading Club begins with an attack on the assumption that there is a single, correct and upright posture from which reading is “performed”. It means to re-conceive the erect spine and move towards other means of understanding, positioning, and spatialising the erection of the reader.
and Margo van de Linde | Improvised Feminism (special late night edition)
#day4 - 11th Novemeber - program starting: 20:00
Veem House Dinner
Oliver Zahn | Situation Mit Doppelganger
Oliver Zahn presents describes his performance with the genre term “essay performance”. “Situation mit Doppelganger” deals with the appropriation of “black” and other forms of minority dances in the pop culture and minstrel shows of the 19th century. What is the significance of dances? Do they belong to anybody, and who is then allowed to dance them? Together with the performer Julian Warner Oliver Zahn examines the construction of authenticity and the process of cultural appropriation in its various manifestations.
- break -
Dounia Mahammed | Salut Copain
A performance full of astonishment about the self and the other.
About looking for connections between things.
About being together or ‘not-being’ together.
A performance of ideas.
Cheerful, wild, questioning, fearful, short and long ideas.
Bâtard Closing Party | DJ Juha van ’t Zelfde
Team:
Curators: Dries Douibi, Michiel Vandevelde & Anne Breure
Business/festivalcoördinator Brussels: Laura Deschepper
Producer / coordinator Amsterdam: Martha van Meegen.
Communication Brussels: Eva Decaesstecker
Communication Amsterdam: Anne van de Wetering.
Technical Coordinator Brussels: Menno Vandevelde
Technical Coordinator Amsterdam: Pablo Fontedevilla
Production Amsterdam: Kim Eldering