Dykegeist is a touring choreographic work from Manchester-born London- based artist and performance maker Eve Stainton. With a live sound world conceived by musician Mica Levi.

Dykegeist is interested in unravelling and complicating the archetypal narratives assigned to the lesbian predator creature. During the current of the evening, aesthetics will shift between a supernatural gothic thriller, a 90’s sci-fi spider lair, a haunted Manchester club scene, an abstract and warping horror-scape, a social situation to discuss threat/the phobic/ consent/ otherness, choreography and suspended encounters, gateways gravel grunge, emptiness and charged-ness.

Stainton understands the audience as active and contributing to what will become the world of Dykegeist over the duration of the event and beyond- in flux and dependent on what/who is in the room. The audience is asked to transition through different modes of presence: participant, onlooker, listener, collaborator, consensual prey. Extra attention and care will be given to make it comfortable to decline any invitation offered.

This research has brought Stainton back into connection with Manchester’s club scene, specifically tracking their affinity with Speed Garage sounds, originating in African American soul and exploding in the North of England in the 90’s. These spaces, sounds, dances were formative to Stainton’s current research into the power of the queer somatic encounter mediated through frequencies, vibrations, grotty-ness and subversive necessity.

Continuing their formal concerns with clashing and co-occurrence, Stainton has created new collage pieces and welded steel sculptures that further load the multi-disciplinary world between Stainton, Levi and audience.

Credits:
Concept, choreography, performance: Eve Stainton
Sound world: Mica Levi
Producer: Michael Kitchin
Digital collage and steel sculptures: Eve Stainton
Costume: Sophie Donaldson
Dramaturgical support: Jamila Johnson-Small & Zara Truss-Giles
3D typography: Pauline Canavesio aka BORA

Supported and commissioned by ICA, The Place, South East Dance and Metal. Supported using public funds from Arts Council England.

With thanks to London Sculpture Workshop.

Felicia Chen’s aka Dis Fig’s music is wild and unpredictable and so is her stage presence. Her live performances have something ritualistic about them, are musical fever dreams – whether as a solo artist, together with British producer The Bug or with other cooperators. Harsh electronic sounds meet distorted vocals and vague hints of trip hop, punk and techno. «This ain’t just your run-of-the-mill wall of power electronics and angry screams. Dis Fig’s range is surprisingly undogmatic» (The Quietus). At EXPOP Dis Fig will perform once live as a solo artist and the day after, on Saturday, she will close the festival with one of her energetic DJ sets.

Britney Spears’ «Toxic» and the accompanying stage choreography are a prime example of the high-performance machinery of pop culture, a paced spectacle. Britney’s song and choreography are delayed 16 times in the performance «Slowburn». With this extreme delay, the choreography refuses the immediate gratification of the original beat of 143 beats per minute, creating an anti-capitalist time bubble. Everything is in a state of constant becoming: pop becomes deep time.

«Slowburn» is an aesthetic investigation within Benjamin Burger’s multi-year project «States of Exhaustion». Starting from personal, social and ecological exhaustion as symptoms of the hypercapitalistic achievement society, he searches in it for dramaturgies and narratives of resistance.

Benjamin Burger is an interdisciplinary artist. In his works he investigates the pathologies of today’s hypercapitalism. His productions have been invited by national and international venues. He is an in-house artist at the Gessnerallee Zurich and co-founder of the festival «Otherwise». As part of a two-year grant from the City of Zurich, he and dramaturg Mona De Weerdt are investigating the connections between personal, social and ecological exhaustion in the thematic project «States of Exhaustion». In this context they developed several works: «Solastalgia», «Slowburn» and «Crush».

Credits:
Konzept / Künstlerische Leitung / Choreografie: Benjamin Burger
Performance: Benjamin Burger, Elena Boillat, Marie Popall, Benjamin Spinnler
Sound-Design: Ernesto Coba Antequera
Bühne: Thomas Giger
Dramaturgie: Mona De Weerdt
Styling: Henriette Herm
Produktionsleitung: Antje Czudaj, Daniela Guse
Oeil Extérieur: Sabina Aeschlimann
Produktion: Extraleben
Koproduktion: Gessnerallee Zürich

Unterstützer*innen: Stadt Zürich Kultur, Schweizerische Interpretenstiftung SIS

Drums reach out like the palm of our senses.
The sweat becomes the current of our vulnerability.
Jonas Albrecht discovers the source of his inner healing in physical exhaustion. Between skin and corpse, he pours on his humility. The pulse is the pattern of an expanding time, the repetition unveils itself as salvation, the overstrain as a vibrating necessity. The drum sound slowly gnaws through the soft rocks of the trance. A hammering until the hearts vibrate, in the struggle with finiteness.

Jonas Albrecht is known to Bernese audiences as a member of the band Film 2.

In the music of interdisciplinary artist Hayden Dunham, who makes music under the name Hyd, every sound has a visual component, a particular landscape that appeals to all the senses: Dunham’s large-scale sculptures, installations, music, and even identity as Hyd are all vessels that translate the artist’s universe into something tangible. To some, Dunham may still be known as a kind of mysterious avatar called QT, created in 2014 in collaboration with SOPHIE and A.G. Cook. Thus, traces of the haze surrounding the immortal Sophie, Caroline Polachek or A.G. Cook are always evident in Hyd’s compositions as well.

Hyd’s debut album Clearing, released on PC Music in 2022, is an atmospheric, minimalist pop album that paints a fluid landscape of loss and regeneration.

Untitled Duet is a performance by Tosh Basco with Patrick Belaga that experiments with techniques of improvisation through movement and sound.

Tosh Basco’s practice encompasses performance, photography and drawing. Her improvisational movement-based work under the name boychild arose from the underground drag scene in San Francisco. She is co-founder of the collaborative entity Moved by the Motion with Wu Tsang.

Claire Rousay’s music zeroes in on personal emotions and the minutiae of everyday life — voicemails, haptics, environmental recordings, stopwatches, whispers and conversations — exploding their significance.

Based in San Antonio, Texas, Claire’s acute assemblages of sound are both a diaristic portal into the life of their creator, and an exercise in dressing and undressing the bare audio field using compositional threads that feel loosely entangled, yet fastidiously woven. A prolific run of recordings since 2020, culminating in this year’s ‘everything perfect is already here’ (Shelter Press), has seen Claire come closer than most modern sound-makers to aesthetically nailing the temperament of a world turned inward.

Now, as music leaves the house once more, Claire’s live show – in both solo mode and trio formation with close collaborators Mari ‘More Eaze’ Maurice and Theodore Cale Schafer – brings a singular reflexivity, unflinching honesty and adroit humour to the performance space, with an ever-burgeoning audience accepting the invite into her soundworld.

“What a songwriter might convey in poetry, Rousay evokes with raw audio. You could call it sound art, but it’s viscerally vulnerable” – New York Times

A Bristol producer, composer, costume designer and performance artist, Sarahsson fuses hedonistic club with guttural noise, euphoric trance and neoclassical composition.

Think moss-girl-summer goes feral in the club and you’re somewhere close to the singular, maximalist creative force that is Sarahsson. She’s not one you want to sleep on, with a live show that brings her various talents together into a visceral expression of transness as art. Sarahsson’s work deals in extremes, drawing inspiration as much from the natural world as from gore and harsh noise, and her live performance reflects this: themes of bodies being contorted, ripped apart and combined anew charge through her work to create beautiful and painful scenarios.

In 2022, and on her last trip to EU, Sarahsson shared nights with the likes of Lyra Pramuk, LEYA, Nkisi and many more. But her work also spans soundtracking documentary shorts «Harpies» about Europe’s first trans strip club and collaborations like «Protopia Dreams» with Studio Dosage and being part of Colin Self’s «Xoir» at the ICA.