Performance:

Blackhaine,
Untitled, 2024

Blackhaine’s performance for Stavanger Secession 2024 channels butoh dance into the harsh industrial echo of Stavanger’s oil and port infrastructures. Bodies move as if partially collapsed, recalling Manchester’s spicehead streets where drugs fracture motion into disarticulated, stuttering gestures. The choreography situates the working body under capitalism as a machine, repetitive and exhausted, treated like a robot within systems of extraction. In this industrial Scandinavian context, steel, cranes and offshore memory amplify the sense of corporeal breakdown. Movement becomes both resistance and malfunction, exposing how addiction, labour and control intersect in cities shaped by heavy industry and economic discipline it persists.

• Blackhaine, musician and choreographer (b. 1989, United Kingdom)