Bryana Fritz, Stefa Govaart & Chloe Chignell — BEGIN / The Mirror

BEGIJN / SIMPLE SOULS
BEGUINE / The Lesbians

BEGOUINE / IN HUMILITY
BEGUINE / DEATH OF REASON
BEGIJN / NEGATIVE THEATER
BEGIN / OBLIVION,

FORGOTTON

BEGIN / The Mirror resurrects the history of Medieval beguine communities: lay religious women who were living, working, and practicing their faith together in urban centers throughout the former Low Countries starting in the 12th century. The performance is devoted to a book written by the beguine Marguerite Porete (ca. 1250-1310) entitled The Mirror of the Simple Souls Who Are Annihilated and Remain Only in Will and Desire of Love.

Written in the vernacular and in the form of a play between the characters Love, Reason, and the Soul, Porete lays out seven stages of love that a soul must pass through in order to achieve its total annihilation and complete union with god. Bypassing the papal-monarchal powers of her time by offering women direct access to the divine, the book was condemned in Cambrai, set to flames in Valenciennes, and eventually Porete herself was burned at the stake in Paris.

Through dance, sound, and text, BEGIN / The Mirror embodies each of Porete’s seven stages to explore the movements of medieval mysticism, the spiritual practice of radical love, and the political dimensions of self-annihilation. Cutting through the fabric of centuries to translate, in all our humbleness and by the graces of collectivity, this fated text.

about

Bryana Fritz is a choreographer, dancer, and writer based in Marseille, with a deep interest in medieval history, fanfiction, media studies, theology, and histories of illiteracy. Her work situates itself at the intersection between literature and performance, and often does so in duet with the user interface of OS X (like hereschouwburg in 2017). She is engaged in a long-term research and performance project entitled Submission Submission, a feminist hagiographic codex which seeks to portray the subversive lives of Medieval women saints (which we also loveschouwburg). Since 2016, she has been collaborating with Henry Andersen on a a semi-fictional reading group under the moniker Slow Reading Club (and guess whatschouwburg).
instagram.com/bryana_fritz/

Stefa Govaart is a performance artist based in Brussels. Their work is embedded in collaboration, dialogue and entrustment. Govaart performed for Oscar Murillo, Eszter Salamon, Claudia Pagès Rabal, PRICE, among others. The piece EEE (...till hell freezes over) is a collaboration across performance (Luka Švajda, Lana Hosni, Theo Livesey, Stefa Govaart), visual arts (Marko Gutić Mižimakov) and music (Leila Bordrueil), and premiered at Cultural Center Travno in Zagreb in February 2025. They teach in the Theory program of P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels), and they are a founding member of Sex Negativity, a research group at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Govaart holds MA's in Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam) and Performance Studies (New York University).
instagram.com/stefagovaa/

Chloe Chignell is an artist working across text, choreography and publishing. Her work focuses on language within a choreographic frame and invests in writing as a body building practice. Chloe graduated from a.pass (BE, 2020) and from the research cycle at P.A.R.T.S (BE, 2018). Since 2019, Chloe co-runs rile* a bookshop and project space for publication and performance with Sven Dehens. Her work has been presented across Europe and Australia, including at Saal Biennale (ES 2021), Moving Words Festival (NO 2021), QL2 (AU 2022), and here at welcomebackschouwburg just last year. Her first book was published with uhbooks in 2020 under the title The Complete Text Would Be Insufferable. She currently teaches in the BA and MA dance programs at ISAC (BE) and P.A.R.T.S. (BE).
instagram.com/chloechignell/