Cherish Menzo: DARKMATTER (2022)
Monday, 30 November 2026, at 6:00 pm
Kino Šiška, Katedrala
dance performance
Duration: 85 min.
A conversation with the authors, moderated by Rok Vevar, will take place following the performance.
Please note: Stroboscope effects are used in this performance and there are 3 extensive black-outs. The music in this work can be perceived as intensive, earplugs are at your disposal. In certain scenes, the performers are nude.
One of the most important dance works by one of the most exciting dance artists of recent years, DARKMATTER is a resistance to the ways in which human bodies or lives are perceived, positioned, and categorised. Beyond projections, it opens up a reckoning with blindness that seems to be the most potent choreographic world since the emergence of Pina Bausch.
The concept of mimicry, which humankind drew out of the animal world, is familiar to us as a set of objectifying tactics, ways of choreographing perception − of how a given body, in the eyes of the viewer, organises the way it is looked at. Different cultures have their own forms of combat camouflage meant to frighten the viewer, or ways in which the body transforms itself into unnoticeability: how it blends into the background. The concept of mimicry does not, however, account for the viewer’s own fantasies. Perhaps hallucinatory psychoses, too, should be treated as failed or successful forms of mimicry. Perhaps the fantastical creatures that, in various periods, appear in a range of ways in literature or visual imagery should be understood as a mimicry created by the viewer, so that, one way or another, they enhance his/her (targeted and bounded) world. Contemporary dance has always seemed to us a practice that must be capable of engaging with bodies beyond bodily screens and beyond the forms of mimicry created so that bodily postures might blend into the background, or so that we need not see them at all. Bodies are projection screens for functional worlds, traps that catch lazy gazes, or our own voluntary blindness. We are convinced that contemporary dance must be a practice that should come to know its own body only by seeing beyond the screens, beyond mimicry. Each time into the dark, or darkened, matter. Of bodies.
“In DARKMATTER, Cherish Menzo and her stage partner Camilo Mejía Cortés search for ways to separate their bodies from the ways they are looked at, and from the everyday reality in which they move. Among other things, they look up to the sky, into dark matter and black holes, meeting and colliding with one another, so that a new, Afrofuturist and enigmatic body might be born from them. DARKMATTER strives to break free of biased ways of looking at bodies, at the other, and at the stories attached to them. Working together, they expose their bodies to a complex debate, in which they seek both to enter it and to move beyond it, forward: the duality that sustains the performance,” write the performance’s creators. The task the performance sets us is a training ground for our own sensory and cultural perception − for the ways we look at bodies, and the ways bodies look at us. A neuropolitical task, so to speak.
Concept and Choreography: Cherish Menzo
Creation and Performance: Camilo Mejía Cortés, Cherish Menzo
Lighting Design: Niels Runderkamp
Music: Gagi Petrovic, Michael Nunes
Mastering: Gagi Petrovic
Set Design: Morgana Machado Marques
Costume Design: JustTatty.com
Dramaturgy: Renée Copraij, Benjamin Kahn
Text: Cherish Menzo, Camilo Mejía Cortés, BOИSU, Shari Kok-Sey-Tjong
Vocal and Delivery Coaching: BOИSU, Shari Kok-Sey-Tjong
Artistic Advice: Christian Yav, Nicole Geertruida
Voices Distorted Rap Choir: via www.distortedrapchoir.com
Technicians: Niels Runderkamp, Amber Stallenberg/ Sander Cools
Production: GRIP, Frascati Producties (Anneleen Hermans, Eryn Kelly, Sam Loncke, Rudi Meulemans, Lize Meynaerts, Klaartje Oerlemans, Jennifer Piasecki, Charlotte Roosblad, Dominique Sikkema, Sylvie Svanberg, Mark Timmer, Ruud Van Moorleghem, Heske van den Ende, Petra van der Meulen, Pauline Van Nuffel, Nele Verreyken)
International distribution: A Propic – Line Rousseau, Marion Gauvent
Coproduction: Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels, BE), CCN-Ballet national de Marseille dans le cadre de l’accueil studio / Ministère de la Culture (FR), actoral festival (Marseille, FR), STUK (Leuven, BE), La Villette (Paris, FR), Festival d’Automne à Paris (FR), Beursschouwburg (Brussels, BE), De Coproducers (NL), Perpodium (BE)
Organised by Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenija