„I always wanted to find a family I fitted into. Perhaps it is necessary to create one myself.“
There are hardly any models for us to draw on. What our parents or caregivers lived and showed us cannot simply be carried over into our own lives. Their worlds were different, as were their patterns of relating. We are finding our own ways of recognizing our needs, expressing them, and following them. As Black and queer people with caregiving responsibilities for children, we are searching for something that does not yet exist.
Three performers move within a space created specifically for the production, taking visitors into their world. The starting point is interviews that Magda Korsinsky conducted with Black and queer people about questions of inherited gender roles and personal childhood experiences, economic pressures and structural injustice, love and anger, shared responsibility, and healing relationship models. The performers weave lived experience together with movement, rap and song until a shared space emerges: one of diverse responsibility, intimacy, care, love and resistant forms of living together.
In Arrival of the Village, documentary choreographer Magda Korsinsky and her team set out in search of transformed relationships — because the old model of the heteronormative nuclear family produces roles that often isolate, exhaust or create dependency. Recognition, desire, self-determination and equality fall by the wayside. And how can one be a role model when so much feels wrong? How can we expand our notions of family and live out collective care, shared responsibility and mutual empowerment?
Arrival of the Village is Magda Korsinsky’s fifth work at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, continuing her search for role models, spaces and narratives for Black FLINTA*.
The work is a further step towards an art that creates spaces of resonance and sets its own rhythm against the harshness of dominant discourses.
Choreography: Magda Korsinsky
Choreography assistance: Genifer Marione Habbasch
Dramaturgy: Yama Tessa Hart
Stage design Jaq Lisboa
Costume design: Sarah Ama Duah
Sound design and Musical concept: Shelly Phillips
Light design: Emilio Cordero Checa
Video design: Naima Maleika Sebe
Make Up: Leila Brunner
Writing workshop: Yama Tessa Hart, Shelly Phillips
Song composition: Adrian Marie Blount
Surtitles: Marold Langer-Philippsen
By and starring: Adrian Marie Blount, Astan Meyer, Sarhaly
Interviewees: Amal Abbass, Jessica Gedamu, Yama Tessa Hart, Shirley
Production management: Polina Tatsenko
Production management assistance: Constanze Schüddekopf
A production by Kultursprünge im Ballhaus Naunynstraße gemeinnützige GmbH.
Photos: Zé de Paiva
