Dort, wo die eine Welt aufhört, beginnt die nächste. Unablässig bewegen wir uns zwischen den Welten – als Kundschafter*innen und Verkünder*innen.
(English with German surtitles)
Where one world ends, the next one begins. Relentlessly, we navigate between the worlds – as scouts and messengers.
The main character in Flight of the Canaries is confronted with all the madness that is our daily life. Torn between invisibility and hyper-visibility, they, as a Black individual, feel pressured into masculinity and high performance: to be special and extraordinary. For many avant-garde strides, for styles and attitudes, they receive admiration, yet are simultaneously threatened with dispossession and disenfranchisement. Retreat? Where to? In solitude? In silence, shimmering figures await: guardians and intermediaries between the worlds. They know the winds, their sounds, and the possible flight paths.
Flight of the Canaries is Bishop Black’s fourth work at Ballhaus Naunynstraße and a continuation of their artistic endeavor to counteract everyday experiences with resistant and self-determined movements: coming from drag and burlesque, they develop performances to counter the compelling harshness of colonializing attributions of sexual identity and racial identity and to create a space beyond eurocentric cosmology and epistemology. Yet, this marks Bishop Black’s debut as a director. It follows their previous works, Permanente Beunruhigung (Continuous Disturbance) (2017) and its revised version titled Your Devices (2018), as well as the solo work Becoming my Body, which has seen numerous revivals since 2019. Most recently, Bishop Black served as facilitator of the re-searching joy production by the akademie der autodidakten (2022).
Artists/Collaborators: Mathieu Amadou (Kostümbild), Amel Baccouche (Regiemitarbeit), Leonard Beck (Produktionsleitung), Bishop Black (Regie), Emilio Cordero Checa (Lichtdesign), Arel Dewi (Videodesign), Julien Enzanza (Dramaturgie), Ashiq Khondker (Sounddesign), Val de Licer (Bühnenbild), Bishop Black (Autor/in), Juan Carlos Cuadrado, Mitu -, Djibril Sall, Ashley Temba
A production by Kultursprünge im Ballhaus Naunynstraße gemeinnützige GmbH. The Initial production was funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion of the State of Berlin.