Batty Bwoy is a solo which doesn’t start with a question, or a critique, but from a place of play and desire, entangled in violence and charming cruelty. Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “Batty Bwoy” (literally, butt boy), slang for a queer person, the work twists and turns the myths of the black queer body unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety.
Scrutinizing the absurdity of a queer monstrosity, Batty Bwoy articulates through the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the corporal fictions projected onto their skins.
In an odyssey of droning prog-rock, Batty Bwoy attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body as a perverse and deviant figure. The expression "Batty Bwoy" is used to evoke an ambivalent creature that exists in the threshold of the precarious body, liberated power, joy, and batty energy! The work has found inspiration in mythologies, disgusting stereotypes, feelings, and fantasies of the queer body and identities, homophobic dancehall lyrics, 70s Giallo films from Italy, resilient “gully queens,” and queer voices in Norway and Jamaica that have visited and taken part of the process.
Harald Beharie (he/they) is a Norwegian-Jamaican performer and choreographer based in Oslo, Norway.
Harald's choreographic practice are collaborative voyages, navigating through realms of ambiguity and phantasm, punctuated by themes of construction and deconstruction, hope and uncertainty, disinterest and emotional intensity. They hold a special interest for the DIY and vulnerability of being in the unknown. In a quest to dissect established corporeal and bodily narratives their work celebrate a spectrum of embodiment—ranging from the pathetic to the ecstatic, the collapsing to the exuberant, the faltering to the tenacious while fostering a deliberate naiveté and queer playfulness. Haralds focus is being with local people, local ideas, and developing ideas with and within the community.
In 2023 Batty Bwoy won the Hedda prize for “best dance production”
Artist duo** Bruce & Lund**, consisting of Veronica Molin Bruce and Karoline Bakken Lund, is a cross disciplinary exchange. Bakken Lund has a strong foundation in textiles - sculptural, scenographic and on the body in performative narratives. Bruce has a background in conceptual art, contemporary dance and choreography. They have exhibited and shown works such as ULTRA at Interstate Projects in New York, The Tomb at Nada Miami in collaboration with Interstate Projects (Miami 2020), The Fool at Palmera (Bergen 2020) and Life Killed Chihuahua at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (London, 2019).
Jassem Hindi is a performer, sound artist and teacher. He has studied philosophy and has been working in the field of dance and performance for over ten years. His strategy is to use broken objects, broken bodies and broken sounds, cast together by nervousness and necessity. His last three works focus on death poems as choreographic worlds. He has collaborated with choreographers such as Ligia Lewis, Mia Habib, Lara Kramer, Ida Larsen, Keith Hennessy, Ruairi Donovan, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Rani Nair and many more.
Ring Van Möbius are a retro-prog band from Karmøy, Norway. They describe themselves as ''Progressive rock straight from 1971, but made today''. Their music is almost a form of space rock that takes you on long excursions into an old prog rock universe. It’s heavy, fierce, pompous and above all imaginative where the compositions dynamically enter different phases.The core of the band consists of Thor Erik Helgesen (keys), Håvard Rasmussen (bass) and Dag Olav Husås (drums).