Afrovibes 2024: The Nuances of Belongingness
October 9, 2024
As the 2024 edition of the Afrovibes Festival enters its second week and many of the productions have already premiered, we are getting closer to the festival's mission of shedding light on North African countries. This year’s festival theme is belongingness. Belongingness, with its different layers and nuances, has been unfolding throughout the first half of the program in various genres and forms. Belonging as a fundamental human need, as a source of personal fulfilment, as a means for empowerment and liberation, as a pathway to sustain yourself.
Naomi Velissariou's Fierce Return to the Stage with HARDKOOR
July 20, 2024
After a year-long burnout that halted her artistic pursuits, Greek-Belgian director, writer, actress and performance artist Naomi Velissariou comes back with a vengeance, screaming at her excessive self-awareness and imposed social images with her stand-up tragedy show HARDKOOR. Blending narrative, trip-hop, choir, and techno music, the show questions the systems and power structures within which identity and selfhood exist, advocating for the normalization of the complex and conflicting emotions that come with motherhood.
April 9, 2024
“Meet the Makers” is a series of meetings and conversations initiated and conducted by the faculty of research and teaching at the University of Utrecht since 2022. Under the facilitation of performance scholar Dr. Anika Marschall, the first “Meet the Makers” session for 2024 took place on the 25th of March, featuring Phyllis Akinyi, a Danish-Kenyan dancer, choreographer, performance artist, and dance researcher, as the guest maker. Over the one-and-a-half-hour session, Akinyi delved into her approach to art and the art-making process, her practice, past and upcoming works. She did not miss the chance to also underscore her thoughts and concerns about her artistic work but also the system within which this is located and recognized as such.
Can an artist escape today's necessity for documentation?
March 18, 2024
On the evening of March 16th, I found myself attending Ira Brand’s latest performance, Commitment Phobe, at the Frascati Theatre in the city of Amsterdam. Brand’s one-and-a-half-hour work blends elements of theatre, dance, and installation art, resulting in a captivating hybrid performance. This ambiguity of its genre is mirrored in its form: is it a game, a live experiment, a research project? Is it even scripted? Or, are Brand and her co-performer, Tiana Hemlock-Yensen, spontaneously improvising before our very eyes?
Commitment Phobe: An Ode to the Contemporary Experience of Existence
March 14, 2024
Where the ‘we’ and the ‘I’ blur. Where time and temporality are different than we know them. When form fails. And words alike. When you don’t know what meaning means anymore. What makes up your identity.
While having no doubt that you are where you are and not necessarily where you should be. Then you are a dramaturg. I think
What makes a dramaturg: A creative exploration/compilation of perspectives
February 24, 2024
What is dramaturgy for you?
How does dramaturgy contribute to the overall production of a performance?
How does dramaturgy differ from playwriting and directing?
What does the role of the dramaturg entail? Why is it commonly perceived as intervening?
Is a dramaturg really necessary? Or, is a dramaturgical standpoint enough?
What are the challenges faced by dramaturgs nowadays?
How can someone pursue a career in dramaturgy?
On Dramaturgy (part I):
Devising our own contexts as young dramaturgs
A Theatre of Nostalgia / Re-finding New Points of Departure
February 12, 2024
"The pain of loss, the pain of return, the lack and desire of a place to which we always return mentally, the remembrance of a lost homeland, a lost person, a lost beginning from which we were once separated in the past. But also, the sorrowful sense of nostalgia: a bittersweet recollection of something we experienced once and know will never be repeated again. A grey-eyed daydreaming about a desire we never satisfied, while we know that the opportunities to fulfill it are becoming fewer and fewer."
What does it Mean to Make Theatre for Social Inclusion?
November 9, 2023
What does it mean to do socially-inclusive theatre? How is it different from doing theatre about or for social inclusion? Or, from doing theatre in a socially inclusive manner? Is the presentation of an act of social exclusion necessary when talking about social inclusion?
The ten-day Erasmus+ Youth Exchange "In the Shadows" gave 35 European youngsters the opportunity to contemplate, practice, and come up against these critical questions.
She Who Saw Beautiful Things: A Multi-Layered Encounter of Parallel Histories and Legacies
October 5, 2023
Anohni’s exhibition She Who Saw Beautiful Things is much more than an exhibition. Songwriter, composer, and visual artist, Anohni - inheritor of the photo collection Erika Yasuda took of her intersex wife, Dr. Julia Yasuda, while she was still alive - adds her own special lens and invites visitors to look through and beyond that. The audio-visual pictures and clips together with the warm, tickling sensation from the carpet’s fluffiness, and the distinct smell from the 17th-century Willet-Holthuysen mansion cannot but evoke an incomparable, multi-dimensional experience to all visitors.
Postcolonialism/Decoloniality in Theatre Studies: Is It that Important?
December 15, 2022
On December 13, 2022, the thought-provoking event “Towards a post/de-colonial Theatre Studies?” took place at the University of Amsterdam, bringing together intriguing reflections from students and academics.
At the core of the conversation was the topic/problem of the absence of postcolonial/decolonial discourse with regard to German Language Theatre Studies (GLTS).
How do GLTS deal with postcolonial/decolonial theories, methodologies, and discourses? What postcolonial/decolonial approaches already exist in GLTS that could be made visible? What institutional and methodological changes are needed to structurally integrate intersectional analyses of race, class, gender, disability, and sexuality in curricula and research topics?
Born to Exist: Towards Bridging or Intensifying the Difference?
November 20, 2022
Born to Exist: The Women I Know is the last part of a trilogy Joseph Toonga created to pay tribute to the lives of women of Color. Toonga weaves his personal memories with the community’s experiences to create a one-hour dance performance that depicts and celebrates Black women’s struggles. Born to Exist was presented in the 2022 edition of the “What You See Festival” in Utrecht, the Netherlands – a festival about gender and identity whose special theme for that festival edition was the use of the body as a protest instrument to reclaim space in the world. As such, the particular performance focuses on the corporeal dimension of living, experiencing, connecting, suffering, responding.
How is this Black experience conveyed in this performance, though? And, how is the (non-Black) spectator addressed and positioned?
