Thursday the 18th of August, 2022 at 9pm, Eric Peter (DAI, 2019), together with Kevin and 'O' will be performing 'Brut (Screaming Quietly)', a performance conceptualised and choreographed by Kevin Bonono in Trauma, Berlin - as part of Savvy’s new program ‘Ceremony / Party As Method’. The performance takes as its object of examination the double-bind of expression that a certain group of people and outsiders face: staying true to their inner voice while simultaneously modulating that voice into something recognisable or inoffensive to their often hostile social environments. This is the dilemma of those who, on the one hand, are encouraged or compelled to be authentic, but whose authenticity is always remarked upon or disciplined by complaints of being too loud, too unrecognisable, too much. With limited political power, those who must use their unique voice(s) to survive, to stay sane, and to hear and find each other are told their timbre is too shrill for the crowd, their fashions too bright to fit in, their bodies too specific to completely belong.
Sometimes this situation rises to the level of explicit confrontation; but usually, is subtle, covert, barely noticeable for the comfortable majorities to even ascertain. Building on the insights of countless artists and thinkers, this performance project helps the audience see the mundane ways culture, appearance, and language emerge on the battlefield of individual expression(s) confronting totalizing social control. We expose the lie that immediate perception of others could ever be innocent. Since perception is the bedrock of thought, our project will make explicit how mainstream thinking is actually, on the contrary, what queer theorist Judith Butler calls “non-thinking”. Our ultimate aim is to generate an aesthetic experience for the viewers which sensitizes them to the quiet screams of individuals forced to make their identities palatable, inoffensive, basic. It encourages solidarity with quiet screamers in particular, and human complexity more generally. As identities are turned into prisons and museums, our’s is a scream in the key of insubordination, defiance, and joyful riot against our unwanted curators and jailors."
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It is part of SAVVY Contemporary's "ongoing priorities of acknowledging the body as an archive and sonority as knowledge transmission.” This program, entitled 'Ceremony / Party as Method', is “a new wing and form across projects. The methodology, underpinned by the potency of rhythm, extends itself as a process of reasoning and communicating through dance and collectivity. Together, moving in the regulation of plurality, the night’s DJs are our priests and priestesses of ceremony, taking us along common grounds of alliance and resilience as they lead us in corporeal catharsis. By means of the honoring of shared memory, beats as routes of passage, and states of trance as vital forces, journeys of stories and spirit are catalyzed by sound."
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Choreography and concept : Kevin Bonono
Performance texts: Kevin Bonono, 'O' and Eric Peter
Project statement : Kevin Bonono and Christopher Sweetapple
Costumes: House of Base
Photo: Alex Leali
