LILY SCREAMS (NOT YOUR DANISH GIRL) | alex blum

During this one-week residency at Veem House, dance artist and choreographer alex blum will continue her vocal movement research to sketch a new solo work LILY SCREAMS (NOT YOUR DANISH GIRL) together with her critical friends juli frodermann and Kween Ghaith Qoutainy.

Through the embodied production of voice(s) and the spatialisation of breath, alex is interested in the sonic choreographies of white femme hysteria, trans anger, and madness. By assuming the timbre, pitch, and breathiness of the voice to be dominant cultural cues of sex assignment within the gender binary, LILY SCREAMS is a public rehearsal of soft wedges and hard ruptures into the sonic perception of gender and of listening relations with audiences and beyond.

To produce sound, the vocal cords must vibrate to the beat of air passing through the larynx, which finds structural support in the pelvic floor. Tensing or relaxing, contorting or aligning the lines between the throat and pelvis, the mouth and anus, produces a sonic choreography of sighs, moans, shrieks, grunts, gasps, melodies, howls, cries, songs, chords, and speech, both acoustic and amplified. Such relation between the sexed dispositions of the pelvis, containing the genitalia, and the body’s production of voice lends itself to this movement research on shame and pleasure, gender dysphoria and euphoria, agency, and joy.

Situated within a global backlash against trans* and gender non-conforming bodies, with trans health care being denied, drag being vilified, and hate crimes increasing in both Amsterdam and the Netherlands, alex draws upon personal and political experiences, as well as the fable of the Danish trans woman Lili Elbe, who was one of the world’s first recipients of gender-affirming surgery, which is represented through Eddy Redmayne’s transfake^[1] portrayal of her in the Hollywood movie ‘The Danish Girl’ (2015).

By insisting on the crisis of representation and its (im)possibility of trans embodiment, alex explores the refusals of visibility, legibility, and regulation by insisting on the study of overwhelm, loss of control, and madness. By activating madness, LILY SCREAMS is an attempt at going deeper into disenfranchisement and failing at doing something about a fucked up world.

LILY SCREAMS is supported by the AFK and was incubated during the GARDENING #4, which is a GREENHOUSE project, produced by Nicole Beutler Projects and Veem House for Performance.

^[1] The transphobic practice of cis actors portraying trans roles.