HERSTORIES
An evening of performative work centered on rituals, ancestry, and sisterhood

During this evening, we present two Dutch premieres by performance duos Anna&Goda and Wildgroei Coven under the title HERSTORIES. What unites these makers is a profound fascination with the role of women throughout history and an exploration of how this past continues to shape the present. They approach this through age-old rituals, such as washing clothes. By removing these actions from their original context, they aim to reclaim power and space for women. Themes such as sisterhood, ancestry, and femininity come together in powerful rituals of healing and autonomy.

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Onkruid by Wildgroei Coven - the collective made up of Céline Gaza and Rose-Myrtha Fortuna Vercammen - examines the role of the spectator vis-à-vis theatre and blurs the boundaries between theatre and ritual in a collective prayer for love, female liberation and responsibility for the earth. The performance also questions how sisterhood can be practised in patriarchal contexts, particularly through an afrocentric lens. Art is prayer! 

Goddesses dream when they bleed is the first creation resulting from the collaboration between Belgian artist Annabel Reid and Lithuanian artist Goda Žukauskaitė. 

Through the iconography of public wash houses and inspired by the ancestral gestures of women washing clothes (les lavandières), as well as the myths surrounding them, the performance explores the intimate relationship between women who reclaim their bodies, power and space.  In a landscape shaped by clotheslines, white sheets, and sound devices, two bodies dive into the physical heaviness of domestic labour revealing repetition, rhythms and body states transformations. Washing, carrying and twisting clothes until they become a weapon.

Through this interdisciplinary physical performance combining choreography, sound and space, Goddesses dream when they bleed invites us to radically reassess the role of female domestic work as a factor of emancipation and recognise the uncompensated labour of our mothers, grandmothers, the mothers of our grandmothers and those who came before them.

TIMING

19:30 Onkruid in the Rode zaal
20:30 Onkruid ends
20:45 Goddesses dream when they bleed in the Witte zaal
21:30 Goddesses dream when they bleed ends
21:30 Aftertalk