In DARKMATTER, Brussels-based dance artist Cherish Menzo seeks to detach bodies from biased perceptions
PuSh Festival duet with Camilo Mejía Cortés plays with distortion through a hip-hop music technique, rap-anthem choir, black paint, and more
DARKMATTER. Photo by Bas de Brouwer
PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presents DARKMATTER in person at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts’s Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre from January 29 to 31 at 7:30 pm, and streaming online from January 29 to February 4; a post-show talkback takes place on January 30
IN HIP-HOP MUSIC, the chopped and screwed technique is a remixing method where a track is drastically slowed down, then altered with beat-skips, time-stops, repetition, and record-scratching. Created in the early 1990s by late Houston, Texas–based artist DJ Screw, the technique is carried on today by collectives like the Chopstars, whose mantra ChopNotSlop prioritizes precision.
But as it turns out, music isn’t the only art form to which the chopped and screwed method can be applied. In her latest work DARKMATTER, dancer-choreographer Cherish Menzo translates the beat-mixing into a signature movement style all her own. She allows textures to become slowed-down and stretched at times, then gritty and fragmented elsewhere.
DARKMATTER is the second in a three-part series of explorative works that Menzo began with JEZEBEL, which focuses on the video vixens of late-‘90s hip-hop music videos and the hypersexualisation of women of colour. DARKMATTER expands on that concept to take a broader look at how Black bodies are perceived in space.
“A big question or notion that already arose in JEZEBEL was very much the representation of my body, my Black female-representing body, within the black box,” Menzo shares with Stir over a Zoom call. “I wanted to move away from stereotypical presentations, or presentations that we know or collectively can recognize. So by having the question of how one can deviate from that, I’ve worked a lot with how to distort image, or how to bring distortion to the practice.”
DARKMATTER. Photo by Bas de Brouwer
Menzo is based primarily in Brussels, Belgium, and is co-artistic director of the Antwerp dance organization GRIP alongside Femke Gyselinck, Jan Martens, and Steven Michel. She travels often to the Netherlands to work with Amsterdam’s Frascati Producties, a co-producer of DARKMATTER alongside GRIP.
In DARKMATTER she is joined by Cali, Colombia–born multidisciplinary artist Camilo Mejía Cortés, who first caught her eye in Brussels while he was performing in Polish-Canadian choreographer Ula Sickle’s melancholic piece The Sadness. Menzo was “blown away” by his artistry, and immediately felt the urge to collaborate with him.
“After a few months passed, I had the guts to contact Camilo,” she says. “We met first via Zoom, and shared a bit about our fascinations and researches. And I already felt that there were a lot of meeting points there.”
Aside from the chopped and screwed technique, another important aspect of DARKMATTER lies in music. In most of the cities that the work tours to, Menzo hosts a public workshop for up to a dozen local people of colour to examine and perform a rap-anthem text relating to the themes of her dance piece.
“I questioned the representation of certain bodies on stage, but also in the public, and how that relates to the environment or city that the festival or venue is at,” says Menzo. “By centralizing the Black body, I wondered, how much are the venues or the festivals in dialogue with the African diaspora communities in those cities? And could it be possible to create a trajectory where this is explored?”
Up until late 2023, she would record the final rap anthem at the end of each workshop, and then integrate it into the soundscape of DARKMATTER. This symphony of voices became known as the Distorted Rap Choir. In total, Menzo incorporated recordings from 11 workshops in the piece, which were held in European cities spanning Rome, Marseille, Berlin, Helsinki, and beyond.
DARKMATTER. Photo by Bas de Brouwer
As the choir’s voices seek to detach Black bodies from the way they are perceived, the movement in DARKMATTER takes on Afrofuturistic qualities. Similar to the concept of dark matter meeting and colliding in space, bodies are reinvented with an enigmatic sense of self.
“Towards the end of the piece, not to spoil too much, but there’s a moment of laughter brought together with nudity,” Menzo hints. “And for me it was interesting to bring this contrast in—where maybe the nudity could be seen as something shocking, or as a surprise, and how the laughter changes our perception or experience of the nudity.”
At times dystopian and uncomfortable, says the artist, DARKMATTER is ultimately a trip that spans latex platform-stiletto boots, live rap performances, and bare bodies sliding through black paint. It’s only part two of a larger journey, though—and the concept for its continuation is already in the works for Menzo.
“Looking back at DARKMATTER and JEZEBEL,” Menzo says, “whether it’s through the lens of hip-hop and pop culture or post-humanism and Afrofuturism, I feel that there is a tendency for monstrous figures to appear.… It made more than sense, with my fascination with post-human thoughts, to move deeper into the figure of the monster, and monstrosity, and what its relation is to the Anthropocene. How can the human and the monster walk hand in hand? The monster cannot exist without the human, so what is that relation?”
If her two previous pieces are any indication, Menzo’s next inquiry is bound to wield otherworldly results.
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