The second premiere of the month in the Sophiensæle from April 25, 2024: Olivia Hyunsin Kim/ddanddarakim with Baby, I’m Sick Tonight. Using the means of stand-up, pop and performance, Olivia Hyunsin Kim and her team counteract prejudices and connect the cultural history of hysteria and body images to the contemporary performance, dance and theater scene.
Image above: Olivia Hyunsin Kim/ddanddarakim: Baby, I’m Sick Tonight © Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė
From the perspective of a queer woman of color with chronic illnesses, Olivia Hyunsin Kim experiments with the stand-up comedy format. Together with other chronically ill artists, she looks for forms of self-empowering humor.
Current discourses critical of capitalism often romanticize or simplify people with chronic illnesses. They are read as resistant bodies that work against capitalism – for example through other temporalities or the failure of expected productivity – while aspects such as constant pain or the necessity of crip time, for example, are ignored.
Together with her team, Olivia Hyunsin Kim uses dance and narrative to combat stigmatization and prejudices against artists with invisible disabilities or people who are falsely read as healthy. The artists use the means of stand-up, pop and performance in a radically contradictory and humorous way to, among other things, connect the cultural history of hysteria, today’s treatment of sick FLINTA*s and the body images of the contemporary dance scene.
Olivia Hyunsin Kim/ddanddarakim work collectively on choreographic works with a queer feminist and postcolonial focus. Through fiction, they renegotiate power relations and offer empowering alternatives to the present. Her work has been shown at the Sophiensælen, Art Sonje Center, Hanover State Opera and Museo Universitario del Chopo, among others. The permanent team consists of Kristin Gerwien, Olivia Hyunsin Kim and Jones Seitz. Gerwien makes costumes and objects for performances and, as a singer, explores songwriting and karaoke. She also curates exciting music with Juckpulver as co-director at TNT Marburg. Olivia Hyunsin Kim works as a choreographer and curator. She was a scholarship holder from danceweb, the Tarabya Cultural Academy, Vila Sul Bahia, among others, and won first place in the Amadeu Antonio Art Prize in 2019. Jones Seitz creates the lighting and video design for his own installations and performance projects and is a founding member of the FLINTA+ network Dangerous Work e.V.
Marielle Schavan studied creative writing and cultural journalism as well as arts and media staging at the University of Hildesheim. She conducts artistic research on topics of self-presentation on the Internet or the media and social representation of menstrual pain. She is a founding member of the theater collective Henrike Iglesias, with whom she has created numerous performances since 2012 and shows them both nationally and internationally. Schavan works in various group constellations as an author, performer, dramaturge and curator on independent theater projects and discourse formats.
ehrliche arbeit – freies Kulturbüro (honest work – free cultural office) has been a production office for the independent performing arts since 2006. As a platform and infrastructure for independent projects, Ehrliche Arbeit combines concept and project development with project management and production management, dramaturgy, PR, curation as well as editing, text work and translations. We work in Berlin and internationally with individual artists, temporary project groups, permanent ensembles, collectives, institutions, festivals and program series. honest work – independent cultural office is a collective without hierarchies and salary levels.
WHEN?
Thursday, 25. April until Saturday, 27. April 2024 at 8 pm
Sunday, 28. April 2024 at 6 pm
WHERE?
Sophiensæle
Sophienstraße 18
10178 Berlin
COSTS?
Regular: 15 EUR
Reduced: 10 EUR
