as part of Fabbrica Europa 2024
in collaboration with Fondazione Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Batty Bwoy is a solo performance by Norwegian-Jamaican choreographer Harald Beharie in collaboration with Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, Jassem Hindi and Ring van Mobius.
Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “Batty Bwoy” (litteraly, butt boy), slang for a queer person, the work twists and turns myths to invoke demonic sensitivities and charming cruelties, unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety. The horror and joy of Batty Bwoy, inherent to queer blackness, is unmasked.
Scrutinizing the absurdity of a queer monstrosity, Batty Bwoy articulates the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the corporal fictions projected onto their skins.
Batty Bwoy attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body as a perverse and deviant figure. The expression “Batty Bwoy” is used to evoke an ambivalent creature that exists in the threshold of the precarious body, liberated power, joy and batty energy!
The work has found inspiration in mythologies, disgusting stereotypes, feelings and fantasies of the queer body and identities, homophobic dancehall lyrics, 70s Giallo films from Italy, resilient “gully queens” and queer voices in Norway and Jamaica that have visited and taken part of the process.
Harald Beharie is a Norwegian-Jamaican performer and choreographer based in Oslo.
His choreographic practices are collaborative voyages, navigating through realms of ambiguity and phantasm, punctuated by themes of construction and deconstruction, hope and uncertainty, disinterest and emotional intensity. In a quest to dissect established corporeal and bodily narratives their work celebrate a spectrum of embodiment – ranging from the pathetic to the ecstatic, the collapsing to the exuberant, the faltering to the tenacious while fostering a deliberate naiveté and queer playfulness. Haralds focus is being with local people, local ideas, and developing ideas with and within the community. His work has been presented in museums, galleries, festivals and contexts including: Impulstanz (Wien) Santarcangelo Festival, Gessnerallee (Zurich), Les Urbaines(Lausanne), SPRING festival(Utrecht), Donau Festival (Krems), MDT (Stockholm), Zodiak (Helsinki), Salmon Festival (Barcelona), Black Box Teater (Oslo) Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Oktoberdans BIT-teatergarasjen (Bergen), Vitlycke, Dansens Hus, Oslo, Munch Museum, Oslo, Vigeland Museum, Oslo, Galleri Entrée, Bergen, Tou Scene, Stavanger, Ravnedans, Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo, Øyafestivalen, Oslo and Trondheim Kunstmuseum.
choreography/performer: Harald Beharie
scenography/sculpture: Karoline Bakken Lund and Veronica Bruce
music: Ring van Möbius
sound designer: Jassem Hindi
outside eye: Ines Belli and Hooman Sharifi
co-producers: Dansens Hus and RAS
supported by Norwegian Art council, Fond for lyd og bilde,FFUK, Sandnes Kommune and Tou Scene.
thanks to Tobias Leira and Ingeborg Staxrud Olerud
The project won the Hedda prize for best dance performance 2023 and was nominated for the Norwegian Critics Association Prize 2022.
photo: Julie Hrnčířová
