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.