Benoit Couchot and Lukas Karvelis, Yet Another Day in Paradise. © Annelies Verheist

review, article

Getting cosy at Amsterdam Fringe Festival

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Benoit Couchot and Lukas Karvelis, Yet Another Day in Paradise. © Annelies Verheist
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What’s cosy about an octopus? Submerge yourself in the Amsterdam Fringe Festival to find out…

As I’m preparing to write a round-up of my time at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, I trace my newest addition to my laptop-lid sticker collection that I gleaned from the very same event…

A human face peeks out from the caresses of pinkish tentacles. Upon closer inspection, the face melts into the Octopus form; two seemingly disparate species finding self within the other. This tentacular image, developed by resident designer Lisa van Kleef with help from AI, is framed with the Fringe’s tagline for this year: Dare To Merge.

After 18 years of running this internationally acclaimed festival for emerging creators, it tracks that the Fringe team have a nuanced ability to identify and develop unifying themes that feel pertinent to the time. The concept of daring, or desiring, to merge suggests a curiosity for radical intimacy. A proximity that goes beyond bodies moving alongside each other. Rather bodies moving as one;
body to body;
body with stage;
body inside mattress;
body becoming sound;
getting especially cosy with the ‘other’.

This year I navigated my way through an ambitious six dance performances, paying witness to various manifestations of merging that traversed the scope of the word – from closeness, to intimacy, from cosy to uncomfortable, and everything in between. By the end of this marathon, I felt embraced by Amsterdam’s scene of intrepid new makers, concluding that there’s really nothing quite as gezellig* as the Fringe.

*an untranslatable Dutch word that captures the feeling of cosiness

Friday 6 September

We Play So Hard It Hurts by Fernando Troya

Fernando Troya cruises the stage, his eyes consuming everything upon which they fall. They lick the stage floor and linger over a pile of mattresses. Finally, they turn to the audience with a sultry gaze. Troya’s exterior is tough; his hips are swung forward and there’s a slight swagger to his walk that reminds me of a movie mobster. I’m overcome by his wholly embodied character, and I’m only just scrambling into the theatre! Eventually, as if his appetite can no longer resist, he plunges inside the mattresses. Arms flail out, as do tops, trousers, boxers, until out slips a new Troya – naked, exposed, and poised to begin his intimate solo.


Fernando Troya, We play so hard it hurts. © Tim Mai Tan
Fernando Troya, We play so hard it hurts. © Tim Mai Tan

We Play So Hard It Hurts is defined by its back and forth between confessional monologues and fragments of lyrical choreography. Troya activates both to explore the dualities of cruising culture and queer identity in an attempt to elevate them beyond simplistic representations. He is the tough cruiser we meet at the start and the vulnerable bambi birthed from the pile. He is attentive and gentle, dancing in harmony with each mattress, exploring their unique qualities in a series of duets: some are soft and subtle, bending under his weight, others are slippery and sturdy, allowing him to slide across the floor. But he’s also unapologetically salacious, delivering snippets of personal experiences with lust, desire and sexual encounters.

The result is not clean, and this is a relief – the most authentic performances aren’t. Troya’s voice shakes. As do his legs as the pile of mattresses crumble beneath him when he attempts to climb to their summit. He isn’t looking to establish a polished arena to stage his experience. Rather, he creates a cosy playden within which he can finally release his untold secrets and reclaim his boyhood.

Trying to get cozy in the dark dark void by FADAT

Have you ever sat in a pitch black room, waiting longer than expected for something to happen? And in these brief moments, time expands and you find yourself capable of tracing through life’s greatest anxieties, becoming hyper aware of your thoughts, breath, creaks of your body, and at some point you wish for Christ’s sake something, anything might happen…

Trying to get cozy in the dark dark void grabs this feeling and multiplies it by ten to urge the audience to practise a now-extinct amount of patience. Siblings Manuel Groothuysen and Diane Mahín stagger stiffly around the stage. They edge closer to microphones on the floor, teasing us with the potential of something happening, but drift away leaving our itch unscratched. The lighting, a minimal green wash, transforms them into eerie zombies hypnotised by the overwhelming sensation of nothingness.


Trying to get cozy in the dark dark void by FADAT. © Tim Mai Tan
Trying to get cozy in the dark dark void by FADAT. © Tim Mai Tan

Groothuysen’s foot makes contact with the microphone with a reverberating THUD and Mahín picks up the microphone – ‘What… should we do?’ There’s an amplified groan from the front row, but I find this first moment of ‘action’ ingenious. It displays an admirable commitment to this exploration of emptiness, acknowledging that to build tension requires time.

In a hunt to establish a sense of comfort in this self-inflicted void, our duo begin to find other ways to occupy themselves, playing with microphones to make dreamy soundscapes, manipulating each other’s bodies, and vocalising profound thoughts. Interrupted by a giant inflating sculpture that transforms the baron stage into a rippling white bed, it turns out their solution is rather simple – all you need is a cosy blanket to escape the dark.

Sunday 8 September

Iraqi Bodies by Liza Sulaiman

How can the solo be used as a vessel to evoke, merge and translate the experience of many?

Iraqi Bodies is a performance cultivated from a collection of collaborators and a wealth of shared histories, yet we only see one fleshy body – that of Liza Sulaiman. Curled upstage, she pads at a pile of soil and rotates like a music box ballerina. In this opening vignette, Sulaiman establishes her performative prowess. Her tranquil visage conveys a plethora of emotions; peace, sorrow, joy, contemplation. Her quality of movement is equally as dextrous. She switches from this fluidity to jerky and precise gestures, then to a jubilant bouncing of the shoulders – a feature of social dancing from west Asian and north African diasporas.

Sulaiman and her co-creators also experiment with ways to conjure the illusion of more bodies on stage; bodies that don’t have the platform to recount their tales of grief at the loss of a home. Using a digital screen, Sulaiman projects the arm, chest, mouth of an ‘other’ onto her own, and at times her dancing is held by the voice of Khazal Al-Majidi, whose Arabic poetry cuts through the silence like a rhythmic lullaby.

This performance is a sanctuary within the Fringe-mania. It is calm, delicate, and it sits on my memory like a hazy dream. Yet the careful and considered craft behind it can be felt with full force. There’s no doubt that the impact of this expanded solo will endure within each person it touches.

re:shape or headless into the sea by Laura Boser

Unbeknownst to the hordes of tourists ploughing past the doors of the Vrij Paleis in central Amsterdam, a glistening chimaera stirs….

re:shape or headless into the sea takes place in a dimly-lit corner that, owing to the accumulative live soundscape by artist Ascan Delarber, is shrouded in fantasy and ripe for speculative happenings. Earthy breaths, clicks of the tongue and eerie whistles are looped and distorted, echoing around the otherwise bleak space. This is a body that sounds less human and more like a dripping wet cave. After spending some time in Delarber’s sonic fantasy, our attention is pulled to a mound of iridescent fabric that has been resting upstage as it shudders into life.


re:shape or headless into the sea by Laura Boser. © Annelies Verheist
re:shape or headless into the sea by Laura Boser. © Annelies Verheist

There is a slow birth into action, which feels intentional. As if it were comprehending its aliveness for the first time, the mound spends time rolling back and forth, approaching Delarber with curiosity and retreating again. The meditative pace expertly guides the audience into an alternative world. Instinctively I find myself searching for the sign of the human agent within this mass. But in the wealth of time each action is given to develop, my ability to understand slips, and I get lost in this kaleidoscope of material.

Laura Boser, the animator of this great illusion, uses the potential of dance to excite, confuse, and shake our perception of what a body can be. Sound, liquid, human, critter; all merge before our very eyes, allowing us to lose our desperate grip on reality and slip into the glistening folds of the queer imaginary.

Thursday 12 September

Yet Another Day In Paradise by Lukas Karvelis

Stage, skateboard, six-inch heels – Lukas Karvelis and Benoit Couchot navigate the precarity of several ‘platforms’ in their duet that traces the contours of intimacy, desire and queer relationships.

Teetering atop the board, they embrace each other vis-à-vis in an unfamiliar ballroom dance, arms grappling with skin to maintain balance whilst staying as close as possible. They begin the seemingly impossible act of undressing one another, a daily task turned extreme sport given their unstable podium and the coatings of wigs, dresses, bodysuits, and of course outrageously tall heels.

When the final layer is peeled off, the skateboard slips out and they are left to explore this intimacy directly on the stage. In the open arena, desire becomes a gravitational force. Karvelis and Couchot orbit each together in an athletic back and forth, tumbling towards, catching and carefully sending their partner away again. There’s a contagious amount of trust; to trust the other to cushion your fall, to trust your own fall, and to trust that within all this powerful embodied emotion, your audience will be able to feel along with you.

Contagious because the precise yet honest choreography lulls the audience into feeling we can trust this duo to guide us through their heartfelt dramaturgy. Karvelis describes this duet as an eternal quest for connection, and yet one connection he can count on is that which he creates between the audience and performers.

Ode to Destruction by Suckerpunch Collective

Thematically looped around sci-fi notions of ‘The End’, Ode to Destruction is a serendipitous finale to my time at Amsterdam Fringe. It also threads together the prevailing ideas of proximity, queer relationships and human response-ability, placing these in an accelerated context of a dystopian apocalypse. With such a wealth of ambitious themes comes the risk of producing something far too profound for consumption. Yet, where some artists might stumble, Suckerpunch Collective succeed, carrying their audience through this hybrid duet that balances theatre with dance, authenticity with comedy, and fanciful fictions with frightening realities.


Blue Quote Mark

‘The End’ is not merely a leitmotif of the sci-fi genre. It is our present.

Blue Quote Mark

On stage unfolds a series of theatrical vignettes in which dancers Lacapo Loliva and Manuel Kiros Paolini explore human reactions to the idea of ‘The End’. Sometimes, this is done through cartoonish characters, such as Loliva’s dilapidated modern day philosopher who robotically flicks through pages of books and reads aloud the final line in a desperate hunt for answers. Or Loliva’s bride in a white gauze gown, and Kiros Paolini’s black swan counterpart who muse, disagree, lament on their desires for queer relationships. In more abstract vignettes, they slip into flowing choreography, displaying a fluency with contact partnerwork that allows them to explore ideas of entangled intimacy.

The work is deliberately amusing. But comedy is also used as a vehicle to enter into an insidious truth. ‘The End’ is not merely a leitmotif of the sci-fi genre. It is our present. In between the lightness, Loliva and Kiros Paolini deliver an urgent dialogue alluding to modern-day conflicts, despairing at the impossibility of continuing in the face of violence. Leveraging their position as talented artists, Suckerpunch Collective administer a necessary dose of reality – an ‘End’ that will survive long after their performance.


I can’t help but think that themes of desire, intimacy and connection are the after-effects of a generation disillusioned by their politically devastating present. The stage becomes a place to practise an ecology of care; to create safe places for self-actualisation; to provide a voice to the ‘other’, declaring them as co-citizens of your world. As I finish up this article, and shut my laptop for the evening, I know that I’ll see that Fringe sticker once again – an emblem of the remarkable sensibilities of the work witnessed at this year’s festival, and a reminder to keep merging with curiosity, compassion and cosiness. 


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4-14.09.24, Amsterdam, Netherlands
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