Performance, 75’


Choreography/Performance: Harald Beharie 

Artistic collaborators/sculpture: Karoline Bakken Lund and Veronica Bruce 

Composer: Ring van Möbius 

Sound designer: Jassem Hindi 

Outside eye: Hooman Sharifi, Inés Belli 

Supported by: Kulturrådet, Fond for lyd og bilde, FFUK, Sandnes Municipality, 

Oslo Municipality and TOU. 

Producer: Mariana Suikkanen Gomes and Kristina Melbø Valvik

Distribution: Damien Valette 

Batty Bwoy is a solo which doesn’t start with a question, or a critique, but from a place of play and desire, entangled in violence and charming cruelty. Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “batty bwoy” (literally, butt boy), slang for a queer person, the work twists and turns the myths of the black queer body unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety. 

Scrutinizing the absurdity of a queer monstrosity, Batty Bwoy articulates through the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the corporal fictions projected onto their skins. 

In an odyssey of droning prog-rock, Batty Bwoy attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body as a perverse and deviant figure. The expression "batty bwoy" is used to evoke an ambivalent creature that exists in the threshold of the precarious body, liberated power, joy, and batty energy! The work has found inspiration in mythologies, disgusting stereotypes, feelings, and fantasies of the queer body and identities, homophobic dancehall lyrics, 70s Giallo films from Italy, resilient “gully queens,” and queer voices in Norway and Jamaica that have visited and taken part of the process.

*Notice: Includes full nudity