Reading Rhyme

Baldemar on his project: “Reading Rhyme takes place in a simple setting: one microphone, one body, perhaps some music (a nice ambiance to set the mood), perhaps some lightly salted chips and non-alcoholic cider. It is a poetry reading. It is a dance performance. The body is a reader. It is also a writer, a dancer, a carrier and courier of multiple stories. The body is often quite one dimensional in its physical representation. We are often quite one-dimensional in our reading of bodies and their physical representation. The body, in this case, is mine: white, male and homosexual (of course, there are no such things, they are just leftovers from linguistic structures and semantics deriving from history edited by lumberjacks and other ‘real’ men) – however, the written voices I will be transmitting are not mine, at least not from the start. They are words and sentences filtered through the genius minds of selected others*.”

*By others I mean two things: 1. Other than myself. In this case: friends and professionals. 2. The kind of ‘others’ lumber jacks (ab)use as an excuse for building actual physical borders where there used to be earth, wind and fire (read: women, people of color and more-sexuals).

credits

Concept & direction: Marcus Baldemar
Creation: Daniel Åkerström Steen, Marcus Baldemar
With Zoe Poluch, Linnéa Martinsson a.o.
Performance: Marcus Baldemar
Texts (by / inspired by / borrowed from): Stina Nyberg, Meri Alarcon, Mykki Blanco, Marcus Baldemar, Daniel Åkerström Steen, Linnéa Martinsson, Zoe Poluch, Ursula Rucker, Kassandra Smith, Leslie Feinberg a.o.
Set, costume & light design: Daniel Åkerström Steen
Co-production & residencies: MDT (Stockholm), wpZimmer (Antwerp), CAMPO (Ghent), c.off (Stockholm), Workspace Brussels, P.A.R.T.S. Summer Studios (Brussels), ImpulsTanz (Vienna)