This May for Festival a/d Werf in Utrecht a new programme of performances by Jutta Koether, Jon Mikel Euba, Itziar Okariz and planningtorock will take place.
- Jutta Koether: Touch and Resist
In her new performance Touch and Resist, leading artist Jutta Koether merges the art of painting with other disciplines, such as performance and music. For Koether, painting is not an autonomous medium, but rather a ‘vehicle’. She said in an interview that painting, for her, could as easily be a flyer, piece of scenery or music. Koether’s work is an intense exploration of feminist ideas in relation to painting.
- Jon Mikel Euba: Re: Horse and RGB Horse
A white horse is central to Re: Horse, a ‘live concert of images’. Improvisation by the participants is stimulated using a script. Simultaneously, a film is made, and can be watched on screens. In this film, links are made between the performance Titus/Iphigenia by performance artist Joseph Beuys (which also featured a white horse), and a legendary recording made by Andy Warhol of a rehearsal of the Velvet Underground (Symphony of Sounds). In RGB Horse’, Euba attempts to fathom an indefinable feeling he experienced on seeing Diego Velasquez’ paintings of royal cavaliers. Through a prominently present horse in the ‘corvette’ position, Euba attempts to share this intense experience with others and open it up to several interpretations. Become a partner in a work of art created in the here and now, with the ultimate synergy of collective experience and individual sovereignty.
- Itziar Okariz: Climbing Buildings
Look around you and you may well see the performance in which a woman climbs a building on the Neude square, the busy Festival Square. The woman is dressed in everyday clothes – no climbers outfit – and her climbing ropes and other equipment are nearly invisible.
- Planningtorock: Show me what you got
Planningtorock is Janine Rostron’s new one-woman act, specially for the festival; actually, multiple-women act, as a fascinating aspect of planningtorock’s work is her ability to present several identities. With her fantastic masks, costumes and videos, her impressive music and commanding presence, she creates indefinable characters. Show me what you got corresponds to Peggy Phelan’s description of feminism as “the performative creation of new identities”.