Ep. 15 - DARKMATTER: post-humanism

PuSh Play

Cherish Menzo discusses her work’s consideration of the Black body in the context of post-humanism. See DARKMATTER at the 2024 PuSH Festival Jan 29-31. Co-Presented with SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs.

Show Notes

Gabrielle Martin discusses DARKMATTER with co-creator and choreographer Cherish Menzo. The show will be presented at the 2024 PuSh Festival from January 29-31 at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. Gabrielle and Cherish discuss the “chopped and screwed” remix technique, the Black body in the context of post-humanism, the equal roles of the beauty and the grotesque in the context of this work, and more, including.

• What is the purpose of distortion, the use of time, and its effect on meaning of images?

• What is the “chopped and screwed” remix technique?

• How can an audience experience of the texture of sound?

• How can we encounter the black body in the context of post-humanism?

• How and why does the piece place beauty and the grotesque on an equal footing?

Cherish’s Inspirations

Cherish mentioned a few points of inspiration for her work today:

• Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva

• Wangechi Mutu, visual artist

• Death Grips, band

• Philip Butler, Black post-humanist writer

• ​​​​Bayo Akomolafe, philosopher

About Cherish Menzo

Cherish Menzo (Brussels/Amsterdam) is one of the four artistic leaders of the dance organization GRIP, together with Femke Gyselinck, Jan Martens and Steven Michel.

As a dancer/performer, Cherish has appeared in the work of Lisbeth Gruwez, Jan Martens, Nicole Beutler, Eszter Salamon, Benjamin Kahn, Akram Khan and others.

As a choreographer, her powerful movement language comes into its own in her own work, which tours internationally.

Cherish seeks out forms of movement and being, while placing beauty and the grotesque on an equal footing. She consciously seeks out an alienating effect to guide both the viewer and herself away from the known. Away from the familiar that we sometimes too easily equate with ‘the (only) truth’. She floats between the nostalgia of 90s and 00s hip-hop and the realms of industrial hip-hop, rap lyrics, manga and speculative fiction.

She created JEZEBEL (’19) and DARKMATTER (‘22) with GRIP and Frascati Producties, both productions were selected for both the Theaterfestival in Flanders and its Dutch counterpart.

GRIP was founded in 2014 by choreographer and dancer Jan Martens and manager Klaartje Oerlemans.

From 2023 on, GRIP choreographers Femke Gyselinck, Jan Martens, Cherish Menzo, and Steven Michel act together as artistic directors. They do so in close dialogue with Klaartje Oerlemans and Rudi Meulemans, who coordinates and facilitates the dialogue between the four makers in his role of artistic coordinator.

Land Acknowledgement

Cherish joins the podcast from Brussels, Belgium.

Gabrielle hosts from the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Show Transcript

A complete transcript of this episode will be available soon.