Ania Nowak:
Golden Gate
Golden Gate
Premiere
FEBRUARY 27 | AUDIO DESCRIPTION and preceding stage tour in spoken German for blind and visually impaired visitors. The touch tour begins 75 minutes prior to showtime.
The performance on 27 February will be followed by an audience discussion with Ania Nowak and freelance publicist Astrid Kaminski.
Golden Gate questions our normative perceptions of loss and mourning. What is queer grief and in what way can it become a collective movement of melancholy and resistance? Drawing from vanitas, baroque aesthetics around transience and death, the work attempts to make space for gestures, voices and the erotics of mourning needed in today´s pandemic reality. For a long time now, collective mourning and its rituals have been disappearing from public space, making loss a private experience of each individual. In addition, as history, eg. the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, has shown us, some deaths are more worthy of grief than others. Given the lack of representation of death in epidemics, pandemics and suicide, Golden Gate attempts to create space for assisting loss in a queer utopia. If in earlier genres, such as Ars Moriendi, the function of art was to educate about death, what rituals can we imagine today to collectively process the experience of grief? The performers Ania Nowak and Frédéric Gies create a queer representation of companionship through losing and letting go. They rehearse each other’s deaths and use this morbid play not only to confront systems of injury aimed at queer and other minorities in the past and today, but mainly to develop new tactics of care and repair.
Click HERE to find information about our performance spaces and pathways, accessible restrooms, parking, directions to the theater, a 360° video tour of the building, and more.
IDEA, CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE Ania Nowak CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE Frédéric Gies SCULPTURES Pakui Hardware PRODUCTION OF SCULPTURES Atelier Gamil SOUND DESIGN Justyna Stasiowska LIGHT DESIGN Aleksandr Prowaliński COSTUMES Grzegorz Matląg/Wsiura PRODUCTION Micaela Kühn Jara, Magda Garlinska DRAMATURGY Siegmar Zacharias VIDEO Janne Ebel AUDIO DESCRIPTION Silja Korn, Xenia Taniko
A production by Ania Nowak in co-production with SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, with the support of Q21 MuseumsQuartier, Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius and Milvus Artistic Research Center. Media partner: taz.die tageszeitung
ANIA NOWAK’s choreographic practice approaches vulnerability and desire as ways towards reimagining what bodies and language can and cannot do. She develops formats such as live and video performance, installation and text. In her practice Nowak engages with bodies in their nonlinear feeling and thinking capacity to tackle the difficulties of companionship and care in times of a perpetual crisis. Nowak’s work attempts to reimagine the notions of disorder, pleasure, disease, intimacy, pain, sexuality, class and accessibility as sites of binary free living. She collaborates with alternative educational programs in Eastern Europe, such as Kem School in Warsaw and the School of Kindness in Sofia. Her works were presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlinische Galerie, Akademie der Künste and Sophiensæle in Berlin; Nowy Teatr Warsaw, La Casa Encendida Madrid, the Baltic Triennial at CAC Vilnius, Q21 Vienna and M HKA Antwerp a.o. Nowak lives and works in Berlin.
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© Dorothea Tuch -
© Dorothea Tuch -
© Dorothea Tuch