Domingo 2023 Festival
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of La Casa Encendida, the Domingo festival expands in time. It begins with a preliminary activity in May, featuring Luiz de Abreu, and continues with three premieres in Spain. In June, composer and voice artist Sofia Jernberg offers a multi-layered vocal solo, while choreographer Katerina Andreou presents Rave to Lament, a performance inspired by the Greek (sub)urban music scene of 1989. In November, as a closing performance, Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Turner Prize 2019) presents Natq.
Domingo 2023 brings together artists from diverse practices and geographies around the exercise of critical joy in today’s performing arts. With sound and the body as its axes, the programme of the festival’s third edition is made up of films, concerts, conferences and performances.
Critical joy is a concrete practice, not an abstract concept: the power of an affect or a somatopolitical state that can emerge in any sphere of life. Contrary to power, which constitutes itself in sad affects that depress our capacity for action, the exercise of critical joy that permeates every dissident gesture affirms ways of doing which links us to each other, encouraging alternative scenarios.
The works that make up the festival are creations by artists whose practices and geographies broaden visions of the performative arts today. In them, critical joy manifests itself in different ways, pointing out the patterns of governing violence, disassociating itself from the neoliberal enthusiasm that neutralises it or becoming an active form of resistance. Whether through dance, music or the visual arts, with the body and sound as the festival’s axes, the works presented at Domingo 2023 embody the power of a transformative and performative force, inviting us to experience it and set it in motion.
Participating artists: Calixto Neto, Luiz de Abreu, Carolina Campos, Sofia Jernberg, Katerina Andreou and Lawrence Abu Hamdan.
Curated by: Fernando Gandasegui.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of La Casa Encendida, Domingo 2023 expands in time. It begins on 20 May with an event centred on O Samba do Crioulo Doido by Luiz de Abreu, an iconic work in the history of dance in Brazil – since its premiere in 2004 – which was also performed at the In-Presentable 2008 festival. This event will include the screening of Calixto Neto’s film O Samba do Crioulo Doido: Regla y Compás, on the transfer of Luiz de Abreu’s work to Calixto Neto for its recreation in 2020, followed by a conversation between Luiz de Abreu and Carolina Campos on the transmission of violence and joy between bodies in dance and the radicality and relevance of this work in a world increasingly taken over by contemporary fascisms.
On 7 June Sofia Jernberg, a voice artist and composer born in Ethiopia and raised in Vietnam and Sweden, presents her Solo Performance, a multi-layered vocal work focusing on the sound of the human voice without electronic effects.
On 10 June, Katerina Andreou, a Greek dancer and choreographer based in France, delves into the transformation of suburban rave culture in Greece with Rave to Lament, a fleeting, unique and impulsive motion piece that seeks to be part of the present rather than look to the past.
Domingo 2023 concludes on 30 November with Natq, a performative lecture by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the renowned Jordanian-born artist who was awarded the Turner Prize in 2019. In Natq, which in Arabic means “to vocalise” and is also the word used to describe speech that has transmigrated from the dead to the living, Lawrence Abu Hamdan examines the politics of listening to reincarnated testimonies, eyewitness accounts that can record crimes that seep between generations and threaten the future.
Critical joy as a framework was articulated together with Carolina Campos and Marta Echaves.
