In her feminist Killjoy Manifesto, Sara Ahmed establishes practices of resistance which examine
the idea of the ‘killjoy figure’ to demonstrate how our Western obsession with acquiring and maintaining happiness can be problematic for those whose experience interrupts the happiness narrative. “To kill joy,” she writes, “is to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance.”

In her new work, Luanda Casella uses the killjoy figure as someone who is ready to denounce violence, even when that requires creating discomfort. In Killjoy Quiz, the pleasant predictability of a television quiz gradually gives way to a much tougher thought exercise. Participants answer questions. Points are handed out. But what is the meaning of winning a quiz? One might know things about the world, but not necessarily understand the complexities behind the facts one knows. Killjoy Quiz subverts the idea of scoring points on knowledge by proposing a game where learning how to enter into dialogue is the ultimate goal. Words are powerful and eloquence is a weapon. The cunning multiple choice questions in this production will mercilessly expose a number of our preconceptions.

In English

With an aftertalk on Thursday moderated by Olave Nduwanje

Trigger and Content Warning: This is a performance about biases and traumatic lived experiences. It contains references to abortion, rape, violence, racism, sexism, and queerphobia.

BIO

Luanda Casella is a writer and performer trying to rescue the art of storytelling from its mediatised doomed destiny. Blending rhetoric with irony, her work exposes language constructions, exploring unreliable narration in fiction and in everyday communication processes. Her research focuses broadly on the role of literature in the development of critical thinking—the ways individuals relate to narratives in order to create a sense of identity, to form their opinion of the world and ultimately protect themselves. During the last few years, she has been studying 'the rhetoric of deception', investigating the use of storytelling in communication media.

Luanda Casella’s work has been shown in venues and festivals such as Spielart (Munich), Edinburg International Festival, Het TheaterFestival (Gent), or Kaserne (Basel). With her last piece Short of Lying she won the Sabam writing prize at Theater aan Zee (TAZ Oostende).

luandacasella.com
https://lees.ntgent.be/kil-en/

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