AN HOUR WITH: Beck Heiberg, Phyllis Akinyi and Abdul Dube
3 ARTISTS share glimpses from their individual practices
13.1.26
13.1.26
10:00 - 11:00
Thoravej 29, Copenhagen NW
Participation in the event is FREE, but please reserve a ticket as seats are limited. You can book your ticket here:
The artistic research
For four weeks, artists Beck Heiberg, Phyllis Akinyi, and Abdul Dube will be working side by side in the same studio. While focusing on their individual research, they will also allow their work to cross-pollinate and be inspired by their colleagues.
At this AN HOUR WITH, you will have the opportunity to gain insight into each of their artistic researches.
The written body. Inspired by the dance plague, choreographer and performer Beck Heiberg explores how written and performed language can be developed from a choreographic perspective.
Through an in-depth process, he approaches the written word based on choreographic principles. Based on the historical event “The Dance Plague,” he first invites himself to write himself into a state of ecstasy and later into exhaustion. He invites his colleagues to write with him in a shared dance, where misunderstandings, self-will, or shared aesthetic choices shape a text to be performed. The question of how to perform a text will be explored and investigated in this research through various formats, where the text informs the performing body, hangs like a backdrop, is spoken in fragments, or as a voice-over.
Beck consults with philosopher and writer Angelica Stathopoulos throughout the process and receives advice from Luka Holmegaard. During his residency, Beck continues to write on material he has created together with choreographer Sigrid Stigsdatter during EVES#8, produced by Dance Cooperative.
Flamenco & Fugitivity. Spiritual traveling through physical repetition.
Phyllis Akinyi is revisiting G.R.I.E.F., a work from 2021 exploring rhythm, trance and flamenco as interwoven entities. In this revisit she is applying ideas of ‘fugitivity’, exploring how the flamenco compass (rhythm structure) can be used as a technology for a fugitive practice.
Phyllis find resonance with Fred Moten’s articulation(s) of fugitivity as “complicated temporal and spatial anomalies; both before and after, and not confined to the limits of one’s own body ... [Fugitivity is] something that is shared, a communal force, a process of self accomplishment and also of self-disruption, interruption.”1 So she will end the year by performing G.R.I.E.F. in the studio at Thoravej 29, 3 days of 3 hours each - working with magic numbers, to close out the year of 9 in numerology and the year of the Snake in Chinese cosmology. Shedding and transformation is at the core of both cosmologies, as well as in her artistic practice, and she find it organic to be facilitating a space of research-by-doing, alone and in gatherings with others, letting go while being held.
1 Moten, Fred. "Poetic Narratives of Black Fugitivity." Boston Ujima Project, Youtube [Video]. 25 April 2024. https://youtu.be/_noVUt3g68Y?si=1yPQbxpuwoB0MMlt
HUMUS: Tilling the Soil for Cooperative Futures an investigation into biomimetic scafolding for Artistic & Cultural Work
During their IN DEPTH residency, Abdul Dube will open a space to test and consolidate the last years. With a desire to create parallel learning scenarios and radical pedagogies, Abdul will study how trans and queer people have kept themselves alive by learning and unlearning.
How do we keep a continuous learning culture around us, so that we don’t stop caring during times of genocide? During four weeks, Abdul will filter out what they have gathered over the years and work within cooperative principles to imagine infrastructures that surpasses institutions that deal with big funding bodies. By fusing in performing methodologies and weaving in local intelligence, Abdul will work towards a series of teachings that help us not to forgot, to hold onto and keep memory, and to develop a culture of continuous learning.
The artists
Abdul Dube, Phyllis Akinyi, and Beck Heiberg met with Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt at the invitation of HAUT's management to reflect together on the organization's structural design, potential, and challenges. Through a couple of years of long conversations about how to create good working conditions and for whom to create them, a language and a way of being together has quietly developed, which now needs to be tested, concluded, or expanded through more space, time, and peace to develop ideas together that are not only about structures but also what the structure protects: artistic work.
Credits:
Critical artistic friend: Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt
In relation to Beck's work
Collaborators: Sigrid Stigsdatter & Angelica Stathopoulos
Advicer: Luka Holmegaard
In relation to Phyllis' arbejde
Artist and musician. Collaborator, mentor, muse. Part of the first iteration of G.R.I.E.F.: Caro Acuña Olvera (US).
Commissioned the original version of the work in 2021: Yellow Fish Festival (US).
In relation to Abdul's work
Conversation partner about white allyship: Kai Merke
Beck Heiberg
Beck Heiberg (he/him) (b. 1987, Copenhagen, Denmark) is a choreographer and performer based between Copenhagen and Berlin. His work spans a wide field of theatre and performance, always returning to his first love — dance. Movement lies at the heart of his artistic language, forming the foundation of his conceptual performance and live art practice, where the movement serves as the primary tool for storytelling.
Beck is spending time connecting with his training within club and street styles, exploring how these vocabularies can be imagined as narrative and conceptual devices within performance art. His work often delves into the complexities of human emotion — touched by melancholy and gravity. In recent projects, he has investigated the intersections between sensuality and grief, as well as between cuteness and sorrow.
A core element of Beck’s practice is his ongoing exploration of queer and transpolitical aesthetics, both as an explicit and implicit part of his artistry. This perspective informs his aesthetic codes, the subjects he engages with, and the ways he constructs creative processes. It is expressed, among other ways, through a continuous attempt to find rest within discomfort, and to explore experiences that are not represented or do not exist within normative society.
Beck is an active member of Dance Cooperative - a platform and workspace for intersectional feminist and artistic choreographic practices in Copenhagen. Beck has had the pleasure of working for and together with several inspiring colleagues, and are currently working with Anna Näsström, Sigrid Stigsdatter, Antoinette Helbing, Falk Richter and Laura Løwe & Luka Holmegaard.
In addition to his own artistic work, Beck co-curates Feral Festival together with Elise Bjerkelund Reine — a festival where experimental circus, sound, and performance meet in euphoric chaos.
Beck has a BA in Theatre and Performance Studies from Copenhagen University and holds diplomas from Juste Debout School in Paris, France and Hotstepper Studio in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Phyllis Akinyi
Phyllis Akinyi (she/they) is a Danish-Kenyan dancer, choreographer, and interdisciplinary performance artist based between Madrid and Copenhagen. Working at the intersection of flamenco, Africanist spirituality, and contemporary performance, their practice explores cultural hybridity, ancestral memory, and embodied resistance. Akinyi’s concept of Spatial Listening frames her durational and site-specific works, where sound, trance, and ritual create portals for diasporic presence. She is the founder and artistic director of Diasporic Dimensions and co-editor of Afro-Nordic Perspectives on Performance. Their work has been presented across Europe and the U.S., including at the Venice Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Yellow Fish Festival, and The Danish Royal Theatre.
Abdul Dube
Abdul Dube (he/they) is born in '||Hui !Gais' indigenous Khoe language meaning "where clouds gather." Now known only as “(Cape Town)” South Africa.
Abdul Dube is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, curator and workshop facilitator based in Aarhus, Denmark. His work concerns questions of multicultural belonging, racism and resistance, intersectional solidarity, heritage, sustainability aka survival, Black imagination and artivism.
Abdul’s related work includes facilitating an "Antiblack racism in our public archives" workshop with Black Archives Sweden; teaching, writing and creating Zines for the Horizon-2020 funded project European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities; and Creative Liaison to the Aros Art Museum Education Department 2019-2020, visual harvestor and facilitator with the indonesian collective Ruangrupa for 2022 documenta15.
Abdul also keeps to an artistic praxis as print maker, concentrating on lino and silkscreen as a means of decompression after intense facilitation work. Most recent he has endevoured into the realm of audio/sonic and audio documentary as another tool for storytelling and has embarked on the “droster aesthetica series” looking at modern day maroons, quilombos and drosters.
The residency
This talk is the culmination of 3 artist's 4 weeks IN DEPTH residency, which provides experiences artists time for fordybelse i egen kunstneriske praksis.
These artists have all been a part of HAUT's artistic advisory board, and has been invited into residency through a direct invitation from HAUT's artistic leader Alex Blum.