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Live

Image: Billy Morgan

this dark gleam

Lures is a new live performance commission by Billy Morgan. Staging textual situations in combination with gesture, dance and music, the work develops Morgan’s interest in the fictionality of the body and its potential for channelling lives at the periphery.

Mediated by three duplicitous hostesses, Lures is a serial drama that interweaves devices of plot, betrayal and deception to spoil benign representations generally accorded to the feminine. Overcast by the city, it explores the feminised subject as site of contradiction and subterfuge.

Mami Kang – “Luce”, Billy Morgan – “Joanne”, Alban Ovanessian – “Marie”, come together for one night. Or is it several nights?

These minor demons follow a style of racontage more akin to confessional cabaret. Teasing and obviating desire, the performers constitute themselves through anachronisms, revealing half the story. Through sidelong glances, asides and exchanges, they navigate the archetype of the raconteuse as site of telling and ruse.

Divided subjects, their actions conspire to rupture logics inscribed by language and behaviour. It is not they who are assertive, but language itself.

Supported by “ROZENSTRAAT - a rose is a rose is a rose” (Netherlands), Bergen Kunsthall (Norway), Fonds Podiumkunsten (Netherlands) and Arts Council England.

This project is supported by the Performing Arts Fund NL

Credits

Concept by Billy Morgan
Choreographed in collaboration with Mami Kang and Alban Ovanessian
Performed by Mami Kang, Billy Morgan and Alban Ovanessian
Texts by Billy Morgan
Sound composition by Jasia Rabiej
Lighting design by Edward Saunders
Text advising by Marija Cetinic
Styling in collaboration with Samuel Reynolds
Movement material developed in collaboration with Saman Mahdavi and Jakob Wittkowsky

Artist bios

Billy Morgan (b. London) is an artist based in Amsterdam, working across performance and text. The estrangement of established frameworks – linguistic, relational, folk-social, erotic – is at the crux of their work. This twist often pivots around language and gesture as conveyors of meaning, power and old tongues.

Mami Kang is a Korean-Japanese performance related artist currently based in Amsterdam. Operating from contexts of diaspora, her work examines how the sense of displacement, cultural obscurity, and affinity create haunted, uncanny, yet vital forces beyond existing language, norms, and conventions.

Alban Ovanessian (he.they), born into a Franco-Armenian family, started his.their artistic path as the assistant to Charlotte Collet, editor-in-chief of the magazine DOUBLE, and collaborated with various fashion houses (CHANEL, Martin Margiela, Yohji Yamamoto, etc).

Jasia Rabiej is a Polish musician and visual artist currently living and working in Berlin. Her repertoire includes composing soundtracks for theatre, film, and performance, as well as her solo project Jśa, under which she has been releasing music and DJing since 2018.

Edward Saunders is a lighting designer for live performance. Although the scope of his work now includes opera, festival stages, fashion, and concert shows, much of what he does with light is heavily informed by a background in designing for theatre and contemporary dance.

Marija Cetinić is a founding member of the research collective Sex Negativity. She works as Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, and is coordinator of the MA in Comparative Literature. She is a research affiliate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, and writing tutor in the Critical Studies department at the Sandberg Instituut. Her essays have appeared in Mediations, Discourse, and the European Journal of English Studies. With Stefa Govaart, she is involved in an ongoing epistolary project, as well as a series of transcribed dialogues on five concepts: Sentence / Essence / Woman / Negation / Sex. Since 2022, she is a programmer at Perdu, Amsterdam.