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

BEGIN / The Mirror traces women’s separatism back to the medieval Beguines: groups of lay religious women living in communal housing and practicing spirituality outside the jurisdiction of the Church. Together, Bryana Fritz, Chloe Chignell, and Stefa Govaart exhume this history with a dance performance that questions dance's annoyingly devotional attachment to the body (with all its limits) and, by extension, the self.

In 1310, the Beguine Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in Paris for writing a book called Le Miroir des âmes simples anéanties et qui seulement demeurent en vouloir et désir d'amour (The Mirror of the Simple Souls Who Are Annihilated and Remain Only in Will and Desire of Love). In it, Porete describes the seven stages of love that a soul must pass through in order to achieve its total annihilation and undifferentiated union with God. Seven centuries later, BEGIN/The Mirror takes the form of a seven-stage choreography (working toward self-abnegation) that embraces the book's three main allegorical figures: Soul, Love, and Reason. Initially taken from Porete's writing as distinct approaches to narrative and form––transformation (Soul), devotion (Love), and scepticism (Reason)––these archetypal forces have, perhaps inevitably, also become exaggerated versions of ourselves.

At best, what occurs is an image of love. At worst, an image of the dances that were destroyed in the act of making a performance. BEGIN/The Mirror rewrites Marguerite's willful “annihilation of the simple soul” through an exhausting amount of dance, alongside text, song, and handmade crochet. For us dance people, Marguerite’s book and the Beguines are useful starting points to reevaluate dance’s belief in the body as some kind of ultimate ground.

“Humility is Mother, the Mother of the other virtues,” says Marguerite. And we are humbly left asking if performance is anything other than a practice of public humiliation.

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. Collaborative in nature, their work probes the stakes of critique today, and considers the performer as “function” caught up in distinct forms of institutionality. Works include Duplicity Willing, Cantate (2025), BEGIN/The Mirror (2024, with Bryana Fritz and Chloe Chignell) and Cocks had (2022). They are currently collaborating with Marko Gutić Mižimakov on two film projects. Govaart performed in works by Oscar Murillo/Lydia McGlinchey, Eszter Salamon, Claudia Pagès Rabal, among others. They teach writing and coordinate the theory programme at P.A.R.T.S. (BE).
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/