Cover Photo: Yaqine Hamzaoui
Photo: Yaqine Hamzaoui
In partnership with PuSh Performing Arts Festival
Watch Cherish Menzo perform at PuSh Festival on Jan. 29, 30, 31 - TICKETS HERE
Class Description:
DISTORTION – DISSONANCE – DECAY
In my current research, monstrosity becomes a way to reshape and strategize dominant and accepted narratives.
Using the body, the voice, and sound, we will attempt to develop a lexical that refers to existing narratives that we might recognize as the "familiar" or the "known."
By applying distortion, decay, and dissonance, we will strive to challenge these existing matters. Glitching, scratching, and remixing this common lexical, we seek the Uncanny, the Enigmatic, and the Monstrous.
Cherish Menzo (Brussels/Amsterdam) is one of the four artistic leaders of the dance organization GRIP, together with Femke Gyselinck, Jan Martens and Steven Michel.
As a dancer/performer, Cherish has appeared in the work of Lisbeth Gruwez, Jan Martens, Nicole Beutler, Eszter Salamon, Benjamin Kahn, Akram Khan and others.
As a choreographer, her powerful movement language comes into its own in her own work, which tours internationally.
She created JEZEBEL (’19) and DARKMATTER (‘22) with GRIP and Frascati Producties, both productions were selected for both the Theaterfestival in Flanders and its Dutch counterpart.
GRIP was founded in 2014 by choreographer and dancer Jan Martens and manager Klaartje Oerlemans.
From 2023 on, GRIP choreographers Femke Gyselinck, Jan Martens, Cherish Menzo, and Steven Michel act together as artistic directors. They do so in close dialogue with Klaartje Oerlemans and Rudi Meulemans, who coordinates and facilitates the dialogue between the four makers in his role of artistic coordinator.