Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever
CRUISING UTOPIA: Queer Futurities
, 15:00
With: STASIS, Ebun Sodipo, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Miriam Kongstad, Kaeto Sweeney, Nayara Leite, Monica Mirabile, Deborah Findlater & Kiera Coward-Deyell
CRUISING UTOPIA: Queer Futurities will kick off the new live programme strand on 26th June 2022: Bergen Kunsthall invites audiences to board M/S Midthordland to join our journey to a ‘queer time and place’ (Jack Halberstam). Cruising Utopia is a curated cruise with performances, readings and music – experienced on the boat and alongside the shores of Bergen and its surroundings – using the city as its backdrop.
“We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future”, writes José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia (2009). In movement, while ‘cruising’, we aim to playfully raise questions on queer lived experience, discuss the use of the label ‘queer’, challenge what is read as queer aesthetics and approach queerness as a fluid concept. Being on water – the material that in itself holds a shape-shifting quality and transformative power and is deeply connected to the city will underline this holistic experience.
Curated by Nora-Swantje Almes.
Cruising Utopia operates with a sliding scale. Should you have questions about the ticket system, please get in touch via: bergen@kunsthall.no with the subject line Cruising Utopia Tickets. If you find yourself in a position of hardship, please contact this email address to enquire about free tickets.
Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever
Bergen Kunsthall’s new live programme strand Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever takes queer realities and ideas of the ephemeral as its departure point. Together, we will explore the possibilities of alternative world-making, thinking through movement and live practices. The experiential, more sensory character of this art form, and its ephemerality, open up new contemporary perspectives on intersectionality.
We will play around with temporalities, alter realities, producing new takes on the present as a means of coming together and finding ways of exercising freedom. A moving target, the ever-changing idea of queerness is hard to aim at. To move, to dance, to flounder is to shake off labels – challenging viewers’ expectations and pre-assumptions of the straight linear narratives – and reshaping the overall understanding of what is considered possible.
Upcoming Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever:
Echoic Choir
Stine Janvin and Ula Sickle
Fri 26 & Sat 27 Aug
A new collaboration between vocalist Stine Janvin and choreographer Ula Sickle, Echoic Choir evokes the ritual of coming together on a dance floor around music in the late hours of the night. Relying on the power of acoustic voices and spatial resonance, the project aims to create a collective and immersive sensorial event, by placing the performers and the audience in a shared space, like a rave or nightclub. Sound, choreography and the visual aspects of the work, such as light, create a strong synesthetic experience for the audience.
The Good Haffi Suffer For The Bad: a techno opera {overture}
Tygapaw
Fri 16 Sep
Dion Mckenzie known as TYGAPAW, is a Producer, DJ and Artist, originally from Mandeville, Jamaica, and based in Brooklyn, New York. A polymathic artist injecting their Jamaican heritage into techno, TYGAPAW operates at the intersections of their musical and cultural roots.
Dykegeist
Eve Stainton (sound world by Mica Levi)
Sat 12 Nov
Dykegeist is a choreographic work from Manchester-born London-based artist and performance maker Eve Stainton—with a live sound world conceived by musician Mica Levi. Dykegeist unravels and complicates the archetypal narratives assigned to the lesbian predator creature. During the current of the evening, aesthetics will shift between a supernatural gothic thriller, a 90’s sci-fi spider lair, a haunted Manchester club scene, an abstract and warping horror-scape, a social situation to discuss threat/the phobic/ consent/ otherness, choreography and suspended encounters, gateways gravel grunge, emptiness and charged-ness.
