SWITCHOVER 2024 | Harald Beharie “Batty Bwoy”

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Batty Bwoy is a solo performance in collaboration with Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, Jassem Hindi and Ring van Mobius. Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “Batty Bwoy” (literally, butt boy), slang for a queer person, the work twists and turns the myths of the queer body 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.

Batty Bwoy attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body as a perverse anddeviant 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!
Harald Beharie(he/they) is a Norwegian-Jamaican performer and choreographer based in Oslo, Norway.

Harald's choreographic practice are collaborative voyages, navigating through realms of ambiguity and phantasm, punctuated by themes of construction and deconstruction, hope and uncertainty, disinterest and emotional intensity. They hold a special interest for the DIY and vulnerability of being in the unknown. 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

Choreography: Harald Beharie
Performer: Harald Beharie
Artistic collaborators: Karoline Bakken Lund og Veronica Bruce
Sculpture: Karoline Bakken Lund og Veronica Bruce
Composer: Ring van Möbius
Sound designer: Jassem Hindi
Outside eye: Hooman Sharifi, Inés Belli
Supported by: Kulturrådet, Fond for lyd og bilde, FFUK, Sandnes Kommune, Oslo Kommune, and TOU. Co-producers: Dansens Hus and RAS
Photo: Julie Hrncirova
Thanks to Tobias Leira, Ingeborg Staxrud Olerud, and Phillip McLeod.

Duration: 75'