CONCEPT AND CHOREOGRAPHY:
Cherish Menzo
CREATION AND PERFORMANCE:
Camilo Mejía Cortés, Cherish Menzo
LIGHTING DESIGN:
Niels Runderkamp
MUSICAL COMPOSITION:
Gagi Petrovic, Michael Nunes
MASTERING:
Gagi Petrovic
MUSIC LIST:
via www.grip.house or www.frascatitheater.nl
SCENOGRAPHY:
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
WITH REFERENCES TO AND INSPIRED BY:
Act I of the American Opera ‘Troubled Island’ by William Grant Still (1949)
‘BLACKSPACE: ON THE POETICS OF AN AFROFUTURE’ by Anaïs Duplan
‘The Mask’ by Paul Laurens Dunbar
Video clip ‘Throw it back’ (2019) by Missy Elliot.
The Mythology of the American electronic music duo Drexciya
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)
RESIDENCIERS:
STUK (Leuven, BE), La Villette (Paris, FR), Frascati (Amsterdam, NL), Beursschouwburg (Brussels, BE), CCN-Ballet national de Marseille dans le cadre de l’accueil studio / Ministère de la Culture (FR), Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam (NL)
IN COLLABORATION WITH:
Trill (Leuven, BE), WijzijnDOX (Utrecht, NL)
WITH THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF:
the Flemish Government, The Performing Arts Fund NL, Ammodo, Tax Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government, Cronos Invest
THANKS TO:
Eric Cyuzuzo, Jan Fedinger, Dries Douibi, Khadija El Kharraz Alami
DURATION:
85 min
PREMIERE:
12-15 May 2022, Beursschouwburg / Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels
Body can you become hypothetical, a galaxy, in full gear acceleration, a liquid star monster, failing to die?
In DARKMATTER, Cherish Menzo and her onstage partner Camilo Mejía Cortés look for ways to detach their bodies from the way they are perceived and the daily reality in which they move. Among other things, they look up to the sky, at dark matter and at black holes that meet and collide to give birth to a new, (afro)futuristic and enigmatic body. DARKMATTER wants to get rid of the biased way of looking at one’s own body, at that of the other, and at the stories we attribute to them. Together, they throw their bodies into a complex conversation that they want to both enter into and transcend – a duality that feeds the performance.
Just as in her previous project, JEZEBEL, Menzo stretches her movement language further by applying the Chopped and Screwed method to her movement language. A remix technique from hip-hop music in which the tempo is sharply reduced. By stretching the notions of time, the register changes and the performing body manages to generate new readings.
DARKMATTER wants to create a thorough reshuffle of our atoms, looking for a new form for - and way of looking at - our body and the complex outside world to which it relates.
Note to the audience: 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. You will encounter nude bodies on stage.
Cherish Menzo (°1988, The Netherlands) is a performing artist and choreographer based in Amsterdam and Brussels. For her artistic work, she is interested in the transformation of the body on stage and in the “embodiment” of different physical images. Implementing distortion, decay, and dissonance, Cherish attempts to detach bodies from forced perceptions and their daily corporeal realities, underlining the complexity and contradictory nature of images that seem recognizable at first glance. Glitching the ‘’common’’ lexical, she seeks the Uncanny, the Enigmatic, and the Monstrous to give shape to – and materialize speculative forms and fictions.
Cherish graduated in 2013 from The Urban Contemporary program (JMD) of the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Amsterdam and since danced in productions by choreographers such as Eszter Salamon, Akram Khan, Leo Lerus, Hanzel Nezza, Benjamin Kahn, Olivier Dubois, Ula Sickle, Lisbeth Gruwez, Jan Martens, and Nicole Beutler.
She has been creating her own work since 2016: EFES (2016 – together with Nicole Geertruida), LIVE (2018 – with Müşfik Can Müftüoğlu), JEZEBEL (2019), DARKMATTER (2022) and KILLED AND EXTENDED DARLINGS: SUBTLE WHINE in the frame of the research program Welcome To Our Guesthouse (2023) (Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam). Currently she is working on FRANK (premiering May 2025.
She received the Amsterdam FRINGE and FRINGE International Bursary Awards 2019 with JEZEBEL. JEZEBEL was selected in 2020 for both the Dutch and Flemish Theaterfestival, which presented a jury selection of the best performances of the season and received the prestigious Charlotte Köhler award by the Prins Bernhard Foundation (Amsterdam) in 2022. DARKMATTER was selected for both the Belgian Theater Festival and its Dutch counterpart. With DARKMATTER, Cherish received the BNG Bank Theater Prize (2023) and the Dutch Drama Jury prize for best direction (2023). In October 2024 she won the Gieskes-Strijbis Podium Prize 2024, the Netherlands' largest stage prize, aimed at mid-career makers who contribute to the quality and diversity of the performing arts in the Netherlands.
(Cherish Menzo is one of GRIP’s artistic leaders. GRIP is a dance organisation led by choreographers Femke Gyselinck, Jan Martens, Steven Michel and Cherish herself.)
Camilo Mejia Cortés grew up in Cali (Colombia) until he moved to Spain at 14. After a dance education in Barcelona, he started at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance.
He was later part of 'Sound of the Trap', a production by the Bodhi Project and Cecilia Bengolea and of 'L'incoronazione di Poppea', directed by Jan Lauwers. Jan subsequently invited him into his Needcompany, where he participated in 'War and Turpentine', 'Isabella's Room', 'All the good' and 'PIE (Probabilities of Independent Events)'.
In 2020, he collaborated on 'The Sadness' (Ula Sickle), 'Draconis Lacrimae' (Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld and Federico Vladimir) and 'Spheres & Circles, Circles & Spheres' (Isaiah Lopaz). Since May 2022, Camilo has been touring internationally with D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER, a project by Cherish Menzo, with whom he shares the stage.
He is currently working on a personal project that explores the influence of salsa music in the construction of his artistic discourse by diving into this genre's artistic, socio-political, and spiritual aspects. By doing this, he will contribute to the archive of the experiences of the African Diaspora.
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