OFFSPRING

OFFSPRING is organised in collaboration with Dansateliers, DansBrabant, VIA ZUID, and FAAM. It is an event that brings together makers, audiences, and peers for meeting and exchange. The evening includes a break with a cup of delicious soup.

Works in progress

Nos Bida – Shaquille George / DansAteliers

Nos Bida began as a personal journey of Shaquille George. It started as their solo performance: a way to explore memory, identity and ancestral connection through movement. For this research, it’s evolving into a collective research project. This research creates space for collective remembrance, resistance, and healing with other queer and nonbinary artists of colour.

In this new research phase, Nos Bida evolves into a collective process, grounded in the following main research question: How do we as Black bodies, identify with who we are through the experiences of our ancestors?

Shaquille has the wish to invite others to expand the conversation and explore what it means to carry memory, resistance, and transformation together. Therefore they open up the space for multiple bodies, voices, and stories. Nos Bida is a call to remember. It’s a chance to reclaim erased histories, to center queer Black voices, to bring together a community to share stories and to dance to something deeper, together.

AAA – Jana Jacuka / DansBrabant

AAA is work-in-progress by Jana Jacuka, created in collaboration with Eva Susova. This solo work explores voice as choreography – engaging with the vocal practice of yodeling. Oscillating between control, surrender, precision and release AAA invites into an experience that is physically felt as much as it is heard.

Building on Jana’s Master research at DAS Theater and previous work “HA”, where she explored the performativity of laughter and the letters H and A, the new work invites the other letters of the alphabet onto the stage, exploring each letter’s vocal, physical, and political nuances. During the residency at DansBrabant, the first research phase was explored together with external eye Sam Scheuermann. Styling and photography by Peteris Viksna.

With support of:
Fair Performance Pact, DansBrabant, workspacebrussels (BE), Homo Novus Festival (LV)

Wapendragers – Tim van Loon / FAAM

Did you know that ecological measurements have been conducted at Fort bij Vechten for many years? Researchers mapped which trees and plants were growing around the fort and counted the different species present in order to assess the state of nature. Tim van Loon found this an intriguing point of departure. How might one investigate outdoor life today?

Armed with a microphone and camera, he set out to create an artistic variation on an ecological survey. Tim captured unexpected and unpredictable interactions between nature and humans: from caterpillars falling out of trees to someone with a remarkable personal connection to the fort.

TRANS- – Emma van den Elshout & Just van Bommel / Via Zuid

A Praise Song for Change TRANS- is a new work by Just van Bommel and Emma van den Elshout. An electronic dance music set. About being trans. About how everyone is trans. Because everyone is constantly in transition. A loving punch in the gut for those afraid of movement. You get older. Thicker. Thinner. Your hair grows. Everything shifts. Always. You are (also) in transition. A performance as a DJ set, a DJ set as a performance, this short piece—like most people—sits somewhere in between.

With a constantly changing setlist of text, techno beats, and auto-tune songs, Emma and Just create something that defies easy description. Sometimes a praise song for change, sometimes a love punch in the gut for everyone who fears it, about the desire to belong, and sometimes the freedom of being in between, allowing you to decide for yourself who you are or could be. Inspired by writers such as Paul B. Preciado, McKenzie Wark, and Valentijn Hoogenkamp, and musicians like Charlotte de Witte and Charli XCX, Emma and Just present the first step in a longer project with fluidity as its overarching theme.