premiere May 2022

Body can you become hypothetical, a galaxy, in full gear acceleration, a liquid star monster, failing to die?

In the duet DARKMATTER, with the help of a Distorted Rap Choir, Cherish Menzo and her onstage partner look for ways to detach their bodies, and the daily reality in which they move, from an imposed perception. This results in a complex conversation that they want to both enter into and transcend – a duality that feeds DARKMATTER.

For DARKMATTER, Menzo draws inspiration from post-humanism, in which the physical gets transcended. She also studies Afrofuturism, which looks at mainly science-fiction, technology, and fantasy from an African or black perspective. The human form becomes something real and allows us to dream. Menzo also weaves a poetic layer into it for which she gets the mustard from astronomy. Among other things, she looks at dark matter and at black holes that meet and collide to give birth to a new, futuristic and enigmatic body.

Just as in JEZEBEL, she stretches her movement language further by integrating techniques from hip-hop music. In this way, she applies the Chopped and Screwed method to her movement language, a process in which the music’s tempo is sharply reduced. By stretching the notions of time, the register changes and the performing body manages to generate new readings. A ten-piece choir of local performers – the Distorted Rap Choir – accompanies the two performers with their alienating rap anthems.

DARKMATTER wants to create a thorough reshuffle of our atoms, looking for a new form for – and way of looking at – our body and the complex outside world to which it relates.