For a few years now the work of Harald Beharie has been challenging (Norwegian) contemporary dance with a radical physical exploration and energetic transgression of some of the most contested notions in our societies. His only two pieces – Batty Bwoy (a Jamaican homophobic slur) and Undersang (referring to Audre Lorde’s book of poems) both start from a concrete case of reductive and stereotypical representation and then question, subvert and reclaim it on the level of the physical body. Though very different – the first an indoor solo by Beharie, the second outdoors, for seven performers, including Beharie – they nevertheless use a common method of work. What might have appeared a unique solo talent proves to be successfully transmitted to a group of peers.
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Harald Beharie: the present body
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Batty Bwoy (2022) starts from the homophobic representations of effeminate men as sick, deviant, and perverted by tapping into a ‘batty’ energy: giving off a disturbing vibe, channeling a corporeal monstrosity, embodying an exaggerated version of the stereotypes projected on him. From the start Beharie is naked, wearing a silver wig, knee and elbow pads, pushing his fist into his mouth, saliva dripping onto the floor. Surrounded by the audience on all sides, he makes electrifying eye contact before making his way around, running, jumping over our heads, falling on the hard floor. Despite being crafted and constructed, the dramaturgy of the piece seems to evolve out of his presence, as we witness a developing state of mind. Nothing is hidden in the dramaturgy, there are no twists and turns, no climaxes or surprises. What you see is what you get, and it’s all laid bare from the very start in a flatness that draws intensity from the body. Beharie says that he himself was surprised by how violent the movement language became while exploring it in the studio – which only confirms that he works without preconceptions, allowing material to evolve from the process. At Bergen’s Oktoberdans festival in 2022, I remember a drop of blood on the floor after the end of the show opened a lively discussion among a group of dance writers about whether it was intentional or not.
A similar amount of risk is shared and distributed collectively in Undersang (2024). The piece questions romantic visions of Norwegian landscape painting as a fiction of monocultural nation-building. A site-specific performance in a forest, Undersang unfolds as a group of non-white performers engage in a highly physical vocal ritual of calling their ancestors in communion with nature. After an hour-long bus ride and mountain hike guided by the festival organisers to the site, the seven performers arrive one by one, in complete silence. Their breathing slowly develops into grunts and moans coming from the stomach and the depths of the body, and directed towards the trees, bushes and grass. There’s an ecosexual vibe to it, where bodies, plants and landscape try to become one. As in Batty Bwoy, the ritual develops over time through physicality and presence rather than strict choreography. There’s a radical equality between all performers, there’s attention and care and listening and comradeship, there’s eventually a collective body that moves and thinks together as one. Each section and each body of this ritual finds its own timing, fluctuating depending on the energy of the group and on their exchange with the audience.
For both Batty Bwoy and Undersang we equally observe a practice as we do a performance. There’s a degree of truthfulness that pushes us beyond representation and notions of identity, that touches on mortality and connects us to the primal aspects of being a body. Even though the works have clear political positions, they do not serve as illustrations of these positions, but rather exercise ways of existing that challenge and destabilise current regimes of power. They destroy negative stereotypes but also transcend reductive ideas of identity. This method exhibits a deep trust in the body that is smarter than any theory, ideology, dramaturgy or concept, and when given the opportunity to lead the process, opens up an organic structure emerging from deep immersion into the physicality of the practice. The body is literally doing the dramaturgy, and the structure unfolds as repetition, intensity and fatigue accumulate within it. But this structure also hides no surprises: audiences witness how performers are present in an uninterrupted process here and now, and what this process produces in all the bodies present, audience included.
Movements function as empty vessels which are filled by contextual energy
The material in these performances resists being choreographed; its potency might get lost if subjected to an organising force outside of the body itself. And while it is in no way improvisation (it is guided by precise intentions and movement vocabularies), the structure itself allows a significant degree of agency and functions in at least two ways. First, through physically invested, precise and clearly intended actions, it produces affects in both performers and audiences. These actions do not try to create images or communicate meanings, but rather proceed through performance – to embody the vulnerable monster invented by homophobic discourse, to repopulate an ethnically homogeneous landscape with the bodies of ‘others’. Each of these performance sequences follows an inner timing which has no outside cues, but trusts an organic dramaturgy of the body itself, in the present. This gives the performers full agency and ownership of the material, and cultivates a delicate sense of listening to each other while performing.
Second, through what Beharie calls porosity – the thin veil that separates performer from audience in his works, instead of the fourth wall – he and his performers often render themselves fragile by carefully opening to the energy in the space (and institutional spaces are often violent spaces, especially for racialised bodies) and working with what the audience provides them with. Thus, Beharie explains, the same movement might feel empowering or intimidating, depending on the context and the gaze they are subjected to. Movements function as empty vessels which are filled by contextual energy. The performers’ attention and intention are structured by their own physicality but function as a mirror that returns the energy it receives. An example: the encore of Batty Bwoy presents an ungraspable face grimace that evokes pleasure, pain, disassociation and bliss – a subtle ambivalence that transforms Beharie’s face into a mirror for the audiences’ own projections, and that plays with their patience as it stretches time beyond comfort. In Undersang, the face is less a bearer of identity and more an organ that actively participates in energetic exchange with the landscape – saliva dripping, tongues sticking out, stank face grimaces all evoke creatures that are more than human.
In a field that has turned – rightfully but too often superficially – towards care, Beharie insists on a physicality that can be risky for the body and the mind. Yet in the radical equality and comradeship between performers in Undersang, he invites performers to follow him in this journey by creating a sense of trust, empathy, community and shared (movement) vocabulary. In that sense, his work challenges performance hierarchies which (ab)use dancers’ bodies as ‘material’, and proposes a collective, horizontal work ethics – an ethics embodied in the organic structures that emerge from and are discovered through the (movement) research. The form and structure of the work bet on nurturing relations before imposing aesthetics. ●
Batty Bwoy is on tour through March–May 2025, and Undersang in June 2025. Details: https://haraldbeharie.com/calender
