Fluidical, Sophia van der Putten’s ‘vibrating slime installation performance’. Photo © Jorah Sarah

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Humans on the fringe

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Fluidical, Sophia van der Putten’s ‘vibrating slime installation performance’. Photo © Jorah Sarah
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A dance-focused look at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival finds humans on the edge…

I was delighted that the Amsterdam Fringe Festival coincided with my first week living in the Netherlands, and took it as a sign to curate my own dance-oriented tasting dish of performances. Over 11 days, the city donned pink banners that signposted 27 venues and presented some 270 shows spanning theatre, performance art and dance. As a cultural centre, Amsterdam exudes internationality, owing to its renowned creative institutions and commitment to sharing ‘The Best of The Fringe’ with other major cities worldwide. No wonder their open call system drew such an international, high-calibre range of creative minds, hoping to embrace experimentation and wander into the unknown.

… or rather, the ‘unhuman’. Of all five performances I managed to see, each found a unique way to inspect the non-human, post-human, more-than-human, marking a curious throughline for my futuristic Fringe experience that winked (but also warned) towards a future that’s starting to feel less and less

other…

First to transport me to this transhuman realm was the uber-cool and freshly formed Trevoga (Neda Ruzheva [BG], Antonina Pushkareva [RU], and Erikas Žilaitis [LT]), with their genre-warping 11 3 8 7, an eerie investigation into virtual representations of human connection.

Žilaitis stood centre stage when we entered, his whole body bobbing slowly, staring blankly ahead with artificially white eyes (all performers wore milky contact lenses). A harsh light suddenly illuminated the space, revealing Pushkareva who snapped into life, or some cold imitation of it. Sporting an unlikely combo of pigtails, a handbag taped to her chest and a prosthetic pig nose, she jarringly creaked forward. This, combined with twinkling music and vacuous white box staging, soon thrust me into Trevoga’s liminal hell, where cyborg influencers pout, pose and buffer.

All three performers had mastered the embodiment of NPCs (non-playable characters) – a term coined for the extra figures in video games that can’t be controlled and remain suspended in repetitive motion. This contributed to the ungraspable sense of unease. They showed no capacity to think for themselves, instead aimlessly trotting across the stage, ‘performing’ human. There was an uncomfortable closed-lipped kiss, a fight scene and a rave, each of which was infused with a robotic edge.

They also mastered the capturing of generational angst which resonated with the enthusiastic audience. It was perfectly sexy, imbued with desire and addiction, teeny shorts and selfies; and perfectly haunting, with death stares and an unexpected spitting out of bloody tongues.

After this Fringe debut I will be keeping a close eye on the future movements of these three genre-warping

cyborgs…

Robin Nimanong embraced the non-human with a similar porosity in an intimate restaging of their multimedia installation Cyborg DNA. In this ‘Explicit Version’, the Thai-Dutch performance artist occupied an unusual room in the spaceship-like creative hub, Tempel. This building, which has traversed usage from theosophical temple, to synagogue, to mosque, provided the ideal site for Nimanong’s transhuman rebirth as they wriggled and rose from a silver laboratory desk.

The work was devised in close collaboration with digital artists Lux Nautilus and Thomas van Rijk. While Nimanong found their newborn legs, stumbling and clutching the table, they were accompanied by impressive projections in which pixels, grids and lines slowly formed into a recognisable human shape – a digital companion that glitched into life.

Sometimes the sterilised and non-human aesthetic gave way to human messiness. A test tube of bright red liquid was consumed and then rejected like blood from Nimanong’s mouth and, moments later, they embraced an oversized, slime-seeping heart. Nimanong chose neither side, acting as an intermediary. This opposition to binary representation is central to Nimanong’s work, which questions identity, self-care and the future, and amplifies the queer experience.


Blue Quote Mark

We were informed that there would be no need to applaud. However uneasy this made me, I obeyed.

Blue Quote Mark

I had caught the precursor to this solo at The Place, London, where it was presented as a trio as part of Queer East festival. This solo adaptation was reduced in comparison, each element of the visually and technologically interesting work showing only a fraction of its potential that had been much more carefully unpacked in its previous iteration.

No matter, the evidence of expertise in the digital and the lively was deserving of praise. But as they reached a conclusion curled on the ground, we were informed by a mysterious extra character that there would be no need to applaud. However uneasy this made me, I obeyed, and left Nimanong in their final resting place amongst the

slime…

Fluidical, a ‘vibrating slime installation performance’ from choreographer Sophia van der Putten, also embraced slime as a conduit to explore queer, post-human futures, but to an even gloopier end. The audience surrounded performer Flore Muuse who was curled on the ground. The lights were low, but I could still see and hear globs of viscous orange liquid dripping from a barrel above the stage and slapping onto Muuse’s body. They were already entirely covered.

Reaching into the same territory as Cyborg DNA, van der Putten’s solo threw into question our perception of the human body as ‘fixed’, and used this bright orange slime as a representation of their own experience of genderfluidity. The choreography was fairly contained; rolling, grappling, slipping, and falling with the slime. There was a moment when the lights brightened and pumping rave music began, slicing through the ambient soundscape. Muuse, gaining familiarity, got more playful, pausing to let the slime land in large chunks on legs, bottom, thighs, chest.

Sophia van der Putten: Fluidical. Photo © Jorah Sarah
Sophia van der Putten: Fluidical. Photo © Jorah Sarah

In all its over-the-top grossness, it was remarkably alluring, sitting at the intersection between satisfying and terrifying. If you, like me, grew up pining for the gooiest toy in the store, or find yourself addictively scrolling through ASMR slime videos, you’ll know what I mean. I was overjoyed when I was struck with a vagrant blob of the stuff.

The slime gradually became inseparable from Muuse. They scooped it up and transformed it into a phallic extension from their body and a sort of goo-baby that they held tenderly to their chest, rocking as it escaped through fingers. These anthropomorphic tableaux were the most poignant – expressions of gender that were ungraspable, unrealistic, falsified. As the lights dimmed, Muuse folded back into an icky shell and returned to stillness. One might have read a certain sadness in this quiet finale, but I saw it as a celebration of a body in flux – a hopeful plea towards a more fluid

future…

Only 10 minutes later I watched Avantika Tibrewala’s (IN) interdisciplinary solo Killing You Softly, which marked a shift away from the lighthearted takes on cybernated futures I had encountered so far.

Any expectations of passive observation were shattered upon entry: we were being projected onto the backdrop. Many were desperate to avert their gaze from the camera that peered over our seats, others pulled silly faces. Tibrewala, with her back to us, was lathering paint over AI generated headshots. The intrusive camcorder finally stopped and in its place began a patchwork of video snippets that formed the bulk of this performance.

There were clips of Tibrewala in motion. There were streams of written text reeling off data-driven facts about the rise of AI. And there were a lot of first-hand interviews with tech-savvy blokes reeling off its benefits, before pondering on the catastrophic consequences of a world without human empathy and physical touch.


Avantika Tibrewala, Killing You Softly. Photo © Annelies Verheist
Avantika Tibrewala, Killing You Softly. Photo © Annelies Verheist

With all this screen time and talk of artificial life, it was a relief when Tibrewala returned to the stage: something tangible to relate to. But we never received the embodied exchange that this piece needed to progress. Instead, she seemed stuck, crossing the stage in a half-hearted robo-run that bore no semblance to the cyborg imitations I had seen so far. She eventually resigned to collapsing over and over again.

There was a lot going on here, from surveillance, to identity, to the ethics of AI. This scope was not always supported by Tibrewala’s interdisciplinary switchboard. I caught the breadth of her talents, but with such a complex topic, I needed a place to land.

That said, I could appreciate the importance of her research for our creative field: in the face of seductive of AI and loss of human connection, it’s crucial for artists to not only fabricate potential solutions and dreams of co-existence, but to guard our messy human nature and keep a wary eye on the

machine…

Not everyone lamented at the non-human. Some were even celebrating the machine as a trusty partner in creative visions. This was the case in Ummm Yeah okay And? an absurdist ode to the smoke machine from the mind of UK-born, Amsterdam-based Ryan O’Shea (UK).

We were beckoned individually into the subterranean dance floor space by one of three performers, Antti Uimonen, Mar Esteban Martin or O’Shea, shrouded in farcical seriousness. Our guide picked up a chair and decided where we sat. This whole introduction was a purposefully tedious affair, and the weird discomfort I felt primed me for the arcane series of events that followed.


Ryan O'Shea: Ummm Yeah okay And? Photo © Tim Mai Tan
Ryan O'Shea: Ummm Yeah okay And? Photo © Tim Mai Tan

Martin started us off, meandering through the space unremarkably – until an electric whirring could be heard, and suddenly she was leaking smoke from her right sleeve. O’Shea joined her, puffing clouds from a plastic disposable vape. Enter device number three, the stage-sized smoke machine. Each performer gave their best 2001: A Space Odyssey impression, thwacking this robot and scratching their heads until it gushed white mist. Amongst all the fog, the perplexing movement content of this piece was forgettable, but I can recall all three performers prancing sarcastically through the space.

This essentially reflected the choreographic extent of the piece. I don’t mean to sound cruel, because it seems this was the desired intention. Ummm Yeah okay And? was a comical questioning of how much you can let go of creative input when armed with the theatrics of fog, pushing the ‘minimal scenographic element of fog…to maximal effect’.

Keeping the work afloat were injections of camp, from shiny red jumpsuits, to mimed shrugs, eyerolls and audible sighs. There was also an enjoyable improvised dialogue between a vape pen voiced by Uimonen, and the smoke machine voiced by O’Shea with a mouthy English accent, who lamented how hard it was having to work to give this piece credibility. If anyone in the audience was questioning whether they were watching satire, this must have been a moment of

clarity…

I am glad to have remembered this final amusing display of anthropomorphism, which neatly tied up the cyber-muddled future of cyborgs, slime, machines and other defining my time at Amsterdam Fringe. We can’t escape the question of how art is shaping and being shaped by advances in technology, and what AI might do for authorship and the creative process. If this new generation of makers is anything to go by, we should strive to remain attuned to both our non-human and human selves, curious but wary of the intelligent body beyond. After all, there’s nothing to suggest that ChatGPT couldn’t write this…* 

*Disclaimer – it didn’t, but there’s a thought for my next article.


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