Flight of the Canaries

Torn between invisibility and hyper-visibility, they, as a Black individual, feel pressured into masculinity and high performance: to be special and extraordinary. For many avant-garde strides, for styles and attitudes, they receive admiration yet are simultaneously threatened with dispossession and disenfranchisement. Retreat? Where to? In solitude? In silence, shimmering figures await: guardians and intermediaries between the worlds. They know the winds, their sounds, and the possible flight paths.

"Flight of the Canaries" is Bishop Black's fourth work at Ballhaus Naunynstraße and a continuation of their artistic endeavor to counteract everyday experiences with resistant and self-determined movements: Emerging from the realms of drag and burlesque, they seek to challenge the compelling harshness of colonialist attributions of sexual identity and racial identity in performances and create a space beyond Eurocentric cosmology and epistemology. Yet, this marks Bishop Black's debut as a director. It follows their previous works, "Permanente Beunruhigung (“Continuous Disturbance”) (2017) and its revised version titled "Your Devices" (2018), as well as the solo work "Becoming my body," which has seen numerous revivals since 2019. Most recently, Bishop Black served as the director of the "re-searching joy" production by akademie-der-autodidakten (2022).