Tiran Willemse: Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3)

The ghost story of Giselle becomes the primary vehicle through which Willemse gives his past selves space to be as they are – ghosts, not dead, who have not left fully, though they may have been asked to.


Both an exercise and an exorcism, Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3) is an evocation of Black experience within European contexts, and a thinly veiled masquerade of its absurdities. As differently gendered bodies claim space for expression, their haunting simultaneously haunts cisnormativity.


What bubbles to the surface may be headless but it’s not shy. The emerging dance is simultaneously a solo by Willemse and an ensemble performed with the unresolved tensions that move him. In limbo between presence and absence, these bodies –rendered invisible, suppressed, (as certain histories often are) invited, or not – have nevertheless come back to reclaim Willemse’s body. These multiple consciousnesses are given the room to rehearse both as and with Willemse, a repétition (rehearsal) with a difference.

• Duration: 1 hour 10 minutes
  
• No language