SOLO
Festival für
künstlerische Alleingänge
Featuring works by Raymond Liew Jin Pin, River Roux, Strassentauben Kollektiv, Katharina Bill, Naledi Majola, Daniela Ruocco und Melanie Jame Wolf
»So when you go solo you hold your own hand«
The SOLO – Festival for Artistic Solo Actions is dedicated to the performing arts in their most concentrated form. When an artist enters the stage alone, they appear to be particularly exposed to the views and assessments of the audience. The body of the soloist becomes an exemplary body, a projection screen and a drastically inferior »other« in terms of numbers. On two weekends, SOLO brings together artistic works that engage with the solo’s possibilities of embodiment and representation—from dance to lecture performance, from monolog to ritual, and from body art to stand-up comedy. In four performances, two works-in-progress and two artists’ talks, a variety of perspectives on societal norms, visibilities and body images are brought to the stage. In a critical, humorous and in the true sense of the word self-aware manner, the artists confront the complex relationship between (self-)presentation and ascription (by others).
With his dance solo »Solotus – Lotus Fight Club,« ↗ Raymond Liew Jin Pin performs a balancing act between violence and pleasure, in which a ritual of punishment is reinterpreted as an act of rebellion. In »Juice,« ↗ River Roux plays with gazes between desire, embarrassment and revulsion by exposing her disobedient body in a self-determined and resistant manner. In »Fat Fucks,« ↗ a monolog for three bodies, the Strassentauben Kollektiv deals with fat phobia as a form of discrimination. In the subsequent »Fat Talk,« ↗ they converse with the performance artist and fat activist Katharina Bill about normative conventions of representation and ways to overcome them. In Naledi Majola’s dance solo »In Flux,« ↗ a symbolic article of clothing becomes a means of expressing the desire to free one’s own body from the classifications in the gaze of the other. Daniela Ruocco’s performance »En mi Imperio perreo sola« ↗ musically creates models that can be pasted in a feminist reggaeton album like Panini pictures. The performance artist and musician Melanie Jame Wolf focuses on the tabooed issues of illness and death in »Finite Jest ↗« with the means of stand-up comedy and afterwards talks about resistant humor on stage under the motto »Who’s Laughing Now?«.
In a courageous, lively, self-ironic and proud way, these soloists take hold of our expectations and demands, whirl them around and invite us to encounter them with sympathy, curiosity and quite a bit of fun.