Show: Nina Willywonka Chati + Tia Ashley Kushniruk

Double Bill

Mon corps le sait by Nina Willywonka Chati

“Am I supposed to be here? In this body that sometimes feels foreign to me, suspended between legacy and silence?” In this hip-hop and popping solo, Willywonka examines her identity and sense of belonging in a body heavy with invisible memories. Straddling the line between restraint and abandonment, she explores the tensions, the unspoken, the distortions and the rebirths of a Franco-Algerian searching for legitimacy. Mon corps le sait invites us to embrace the silence, to turn the unsaid into a driver of transformation. It offers a different way of existing, outside the box, reclaiming our origins in all their complexity.

Make Me Cry by Tia Ashley Kushniruk

Make Me Cry is an existential solo about the problematization of the performance of race onstage filtered through the psyche of artist Tia Ashley Kushniruk. What does it mean to be the object versus the subject of a fetish? What happens when the public self follows one into private life? And can abstraction belong to those who aren’t white? Through a performance-lecture that uses dance, clown, anecdote and performance theory, we are brought to the minefield of minstrelsy that accompanies BIPOC artists creating work that is deemed valuable for the consuming public.