Is God Is

DUCTUS is the latest solo project by Paul Abbott, featuring 51 minutes of audio, across 12 tracks, and a 42 page booklet featuring new writing. DUCTUS was written and recorded in Edinburgh and Porto in 2019. 

DUCTUS presents a playful weave of collapsing time through a number of speculative elements and fictional characters. Abbott feels his way through learning drums, rhythm and writing as fleshy research technologies. DUCTUS is the latest stage in a process considering sound, the body, imagination, and language through music. This features as part of ongoing investigations using real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing.

In GERMAN STAATSTHEATER, thirteen performers set up a world in which stress, ambition and absurdity follow each other at a rapid pace. The creators Rosie Sommers and Micha Goldberg are inspired by the monumental German state theatre: a tradition full of great emotions, huge player ensembles and serious dedication. They use that intensity as a springboard to investigate how workload and expectations put our bodies — and our society — under high voltage.

Rosie Sommers (°1995) is a theatre maker. She graduated from the KASK. Until 2022 she worked in Volksroom, an off-space for performance art (Anderlecht, Brussels) and is active in the music scene with the girls band Forsissies. Rosie worked with theatre makers such as Thomas Ryckewaert, Bosse Provoost, Amanda Piña, Phoebe Berglund, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe, Gaël Santisteva, Nathan Ooms, Anna Franziska Jaeger, Micha Goldberg, Sophia Rodríguez, Tomas Gonzalez, Igor Cardellin and De Warme Winkel.

Micha Goldberg (°1983) is a Norwegian performer and theatre maker. He studied physical theatre at the Accademia Teatro Dimitri in Switzerland and attended a master’s degree at the RITCS in Brussels. He worked with Sophia Rodriguez, Ivo Dimchev, Lea Moro, Rosie Sommers, Simon van Schuylenbergh, Jozef Wouters and Simon Baetens. In 2016 he founded Micha’s Amateur Theater Group (for professionals), who made a retrospective at the Batard festival as early as 2018. From 2013 to 2022 he was co-host of Volksroom (Brussels).

ROT is a publication reflecting the research “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation,” by Sara Manente that focuses on forms and practice of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making. This glossy magazine performs research, aiming to infect the reader, and questioning how to spread, publish, and help the work survive. 

Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on mistakes and crevasses, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to enter another form of existence, say, a chair?

Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays.

Under the direction of four contributing editors—Amalle Dublon, Kay Gabriel, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, and Anh Vo— we’ve assembled a new body of work by mostly trans and queer artists reflecting on the keyword “gender” and its relation to contemporary performance. Their work moves across multiple genres of writing, from analytic essays to poetry to performance scripts. 

“Read My Lips” is a phrase that will be familiar to longtime readers of the Movement Research Performance Journal—so familiar that the mere reference will bring to mind an image posted by the artist collective GANG, an image that lies at the heart of one of the journal’s most spectacular moments. Issue #3, with its focus “Gender Performance,” was published in 1991 amid that era’s Culture Wars, receiving almost immediately negative reception from government officials (the NEA threatened to withdraw funding from Movement Research) and many members of the dance community (who considered Issue #3 to be deliberately provoking the so-called “war,” intentionally taking a political position that some worried might comprise future funding of the field). In the thirty-three years since its publication, Issue #3 has developed a patina familiar to many artist-activist histories that are looked upon with romance and nostalgia, often by those for whom that history is only a fantasy (rather than a lived experience).