© Gert Jan Van Rooij

Riley Harmon A method for blue logic

19:00-23:00

In 2012, Riley Harmon received an email from a conspiracy theorist. He was confused with a homonym, an actress who would have been created by the government to mislead the media. As an uncertain exploration of this mail he created the film A method for blue logic: in which you lose grip on what is real and what isn’t.

Relentless - Tom Engels invites Göksu Kunak

19:00–19:45

What does it mean to perform today? What do we want to perform? What do we want to stand for? What matters? What brings us to doing what we do? Why do we keep insisting, fighting waves of incompatible thoughts? What do we lend our bodies and minds to? What do we want to be penetrated by? Shall we be relentless? Shall we embody that which never seizes? Lingering questions in a world facing crises – manifold and manywhere.
On the occasion of Batard 2016, Tom Engels publishes relentless, a volume of fierce pieces by Bojana Cvejić, Samlingen (Amanda Apetrea, Nadja Hjorton, Stina Nyberg, Halla Ólafsdóttir and Zoë Poluch), Göksu Kunak, Bryana Fritz, Hana Miletić and a pirate. During three consecutive evenings, Tom Engels invites guest to launch the publication.

© Chrisander Brun

Nadja Hjorton Medea – it’s a classic

20:00–21:00

Medea is a very annoying person. To avenge her boyfriend Jason she kills her children, and takes the opportunity to kill King Creon and his daughter while she’s at it. But she is also an oppressed, humiliated woman who rises and does the impossible - she slaughters patriarchy, reproduction and heteronormativity during one thrilling day in Corinth.

 Medea – it’s a classic uses Euripides’ play Medea to move around questions about which narratives we implicitly and explicitly choose to reproduce, assuming that by choosing we also do a large gesture of excluding. It uses the classic tragedy - its function, aesthetics, symbolism and structure - as a filter for choreography and music. With too-much-of-everything and Dionysian decadence Medea – it’s a classic wants to include more narratives in the Medea myth.

Anne Reijniers & Rob Jacobs – Échangeur

21:00-21:30

In the streets of the metropolis of Kinshasa, young Congolese imagine their version of the colonial past. While archival footage shows how the statue of explorer Stanley is being towed by a crane, a Lumumba imitator is looking for former president Mobutu. A man scrubs manhole covers until the word 'Leopoldville' becomes legible again. A boy with a whitewashed face, tropical helmet and whip, dances with ghosts on a roof. After the Democratic Republic of Congo gained independence, the Belgian colonial monuments were removed from Kinshasa's public squares. Today they stand side by side in the Congolese National Museum. In Échangeur emerges an imaginary city around an empty pedestal, where archival footage, performances and present-day Kinshasa interact.

Talk URBAN SPACE: A SITE OF REPRESENTATION with Anne Reijniers​ and Rob Jacobs

21:30–22:00

To open up a new space for encounters and shared thinking within the festival programme, this year, Batard would like to introduce to you the invited artists in a series of public talks. Each night two artists/collectives will join Maria Rößler for a conversation about concepts and questions that they are concerned with in their artistic research. These talks are a unique opportunity to get to know the international festival artists outside and beyond their performances. They will take place each night of the festival, in the time between two performances. Admission is free.
Maria Rößler lives and works between Amsterdam and Berlin. She studied Theatre and Media Science in Berlin and Dublin. As a producer and dramaturge, she has worked for performing arts productions, festivals and conferences. From 2013 until 2016, she was part of the artistic programme team of Foreign Affairs festival at Berliner Festspiele. Besides, she pursues independent projects including an on-going collaboration with technologist Nathan Fain. Together they developed the performance “Right Is the Might of the Community. A lecture on future democracy“, commissioned by HAU Berlin, which was presented by Batard in 2015.

Ogutu Muraya – Fractured Memory

22:00–23:00

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do… And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to assess the history that has placed one where one is, and formed one’s point of view. – James Baldwin

Through interlacing literary text, video projection and storytelling, Ogutu poses the question - how to deal with an inherited history full of complexity. The piece reimagines James Baldwin’s essay ‘Princes and Powers’ which describes in great detail a congress of Afro-intellectuals, writers, artists, philosophers and theorists, held at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1956. Central to his research and this performance is a multiplicity of perspectives which includes Baldwin’s essay, historical archive, and personal experience.
Through examining the legacy of the congress, injecting the personal and creating fiction, the performance becomes a shift of perspectives, disjointed voices and fractured contours. The performance aims to create an acknowledgement of a shared history and find a new vocabulary to deal with its uncomfortable truths. Ogutu explores the boarders between oral and visual narrative in order to create a multi-dimensional space that is discontinuous and characterized by fragmented time. A space where the teller and the image form a dialogue.