Flight of the Canaries

Where one world ends, the next one begins. Relentlessly, we navigate between the worlds – as scouts and messengers.

The main character in Flight of the Canaries is confronted with all the madness that is our daily life. 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: coming from drag and burlesque, they develop performances to counter the compelling harshness of colonializing attributions of sexual identity and racial identity and to 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 Vol. II (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.

As part of the akademie der autodidakten, Bishop Black acted as guidance for the production re-searching joy in 2022. Flight of the Canaries is Bishop Black’s directorial debut.

(in English with German surtitles)