Bâtard Festival Amsterdam – Day 3

For the second time in its existence this Brussels festival extends its time and space from Beursschouwburg in Brussels to Veem House in Amsterdam. A festival presenting international emerging makers and thinkers. On Day 3 Oneka Von Schrader and Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen will show their latest works.

Oneka Von Schrader  | She

SHE  is a performance by the Austrian choreographer Oneka von Schrader. Her work explores the dunes between the land and sea of holy and practical, while researching movement as a means to stretch away from representation and fixed positions in a wish for swimming with the flux. Only to interrupt it. A little. Just kidding.

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]. 

SHE challenges ideas of authorship, always assuming SHE-ness, channeling feminist voices from the past, present and future. SHE is residing in the wooden shrine, the sound of the bag-pipe, your personal headache, always more than what is immediately visible to the eye. We are SHE, and you are SHE, and SHE is inheriting the HE, and the phallus is female, a soft, soft snake. We watch with eyes of g major melodies.

And we dance together even from far away.

Jaha Koo | Cuckoo

고립무원, a feeling of “helpless isolation”, is characteristic of the life of the younger generation in present-day South Korea, the home of theatre-maker Jaha Koo.

Structural problems such as youth unemployment or sexism are individualised, and a military, hierarchical social order knows no room for rebellion, expecting humbleness towards the powerful. Increasing suicide rates, isolation, a fixation on personal appearance, and the omnipresence of technology are just some of the symptoms of this condition.

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?

Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen | Slow Reading Club

Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. 

(Jean Genet in The Thief’s Journal, 1949)

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. 

Slow Reading Club (SRC) is a semi-fictional reading group initiated by Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen. The group deals in constructed situations for collective reading. SRC looks at, probes, and interrupts ‘readership’ as a way to stimulate the contact zones between reader and text, text and text, reader and reader. For Bâtard Festival, SRC will lead the public through a number of late night choreographic reading situations. SRC does not aim at deconstruction or even comprehension of the texts, but at the production of a kind of excess: to temporarily suspend criticality for intimacy and to negotiate agencies with the text.