"Batty Bwoy" is a solo performance by and with Harald Beharie in collaboration with Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, Jassem Hindi and Ring van Möbius. Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “Batty Bwoy” (literally, butt boy), derogatory slang for a queer person, Beharie twists and turns myths to invoke demonic sensitivities and charming cruelties, unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety. 

The horror and joy of "Batty Bwoy", inherent to queer blackness, is unmasked. Scrutinizing the absurdity of a queer monstrosity, "Batty Bwoy" articulates through dance the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the corporal fictions projected onto their skins.

"Batty Bwoy" attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body as a perverse and deviant figure. The expression "Batty Bwoy" is used to evoke an ambivalent creature that exists in the threshold of the precarious body, liberated power, joy and batty energy. The work has found inspiration in mythologies, disgusting stereotypes, feelings and fantasies of the queer body and identities, homophobic dancehall lyrics, 70’s Italian Giallo films, resilient “gully queens” and queer voices in Norway and Jamaica that have visited and taken part of the process.

The project is a co-production with Dansens Hus, Oslo and RAS, Sandnes and premiered January 20th, 2022.

Thanks to Tobias Leira, Ingeborg Staxrud Olerud and Phillip McLeod.

Age limit: 15

No photos allowed during the performance.