Co-funded by the
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
Kampnagel is a world-renowned international production venue for contemporary performing arts and also presents concerts, conferences and a variety of festivals. On six stages with capacities from 1000 to 100 seats, Kampnagel shows the works of international artists as well as those of the local Hamburg scene.
Kampnagel, the international arts center in Hamburg, is Europe’s largest production venue for contemporary performing arts. It presents works at the intersection of dance, theater, performance, music, visual arts and architecture on six stages located in a former crane factory building. Its program is made up of international productions and co-productions and locally produced works by the Hamburg performing arts and dance scene. There are also smaller and bigger festivals including the international renowned International Summer Festival. Kampnagel regularly hosts conferences and symposia about contemporary social discourses. Kampnagel is a productive laboratory for the development of ideas, exploring new formats that tackle modern forms of communication, interaction and participation as well as the transfer of knowledge and our conception of the public sphere. Kampnagel is simultaneously locally anchored and internationally connected. The arts center creates links between artists and between different artistic languages. It regularly comes into dialogue with activists and researchers, and takes the (cultural-) political lead. Every season, Kampnagel attracts approximately 180,000 visitors. During the last years Kampnagel has continuously been working with artists, activists, local and international partners on de-colonial strategies, solidarity practices, gender politics, feminism and queerness. In our program remembrance culture is re-established as an important means to fight the social uprising of discrimination and racism. Kampnagel constantly works on the awareness of our audiences for our ecology and non-human species. The collaboration with our ACT partners gives us the chance to share our practices, to learn from each other and to raise the impact of our actions.
In his trilogy Porca Miseria, Trajal Harrell’s inspiration is the study of “bitches”, aka strong women from literature and history. The key figure of this performance is Maggie, from Tennessee Williams’ classic “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”. Thus, Harrell reveals and deconstructs the social fabric of a segregated society, while dancing, voguing and celebrating the American South.
With HOUSE OF HOPE – the first part of the TRILOGY OF TOMORROW – QUEER B-CADEMY sets out on a visionary journey within our own four walls. How do we experience being at home, where and under what conditions do we feel at home? What if we have never felt that way? For four days Kampnagel is being transformed into a home, with a bathroom, open-plan living room and a play area. The heart that seeks a home needs hope. And hope is at the heart of the QUEER B-CADEMY curriculum.
The Day 2 of the 2020 Queer-B-Cademy includes: “SEXXES”, a performance by Mamoru Iriguchi; “BAD LUGANDAN”, a performance by and with Samra Mayanja; a concert by Fayim fka Sidney Frenz; a ballroom dance by Kiki House of Angels; two DJ sets by Seven Angel and Saeleen Bouvar.
The Day 3 of the Queer-B-Cademy includes the following programme: “Ness – The Miracles of oral pleasures”, a workshop with Valentine Tanz; “Tiered Tongues”, a workshop with Samra Mayanja and mother tongues collective; “SEXXES”, a performance by and with Mamoru Iriguchi; “JOY NDUKU” by and with Subira Joy and Wandia Nduku; a concert by The Muslims; a DJ-Set / Performance by B2BCREW.
The three show days nicely exhausted all of us. But instead of chilling in your own bed, come to Queer B-Cademy’s annual hangover brunch: How do we do in the end of the week? What moved, calmed and touched us? Did we find a new home? Aside vegan treats the table is also set with queered classic board-games developed for last year’s Queer B-Cademy – cause home is where your board game is! A good selection of some sweet sounds from DJ Waxs’ collection will complete the feelgood moment. Come brunch, play and gossip with us!
RECLAIMING HISTORY’s artists and theorists reflect on the colonization of history and its contribution to postulate a stable patriarchal power. Thus, the festival presents unheard narratives. It also practices alternative cultures of remembrance and “herstory” telling. Indeed, the goal is to think of a present and a future that gives both visibility and a voice to those who have been left outside of his-story until now.
The artist Lucy McCormick presents this “as trashy and crass as it is honest and exposing” (The Guardian) performance. Thus, she crawls through the annals of history in this enthusiastically humiliating exploration of power and purpose.
This performance is part of the RECLAIMING HISTORY Festival.
In his new performance, inspired by Derrida, Ariel Efraim Ashbel offers a critical and equally hopeful view on the world’s end. Investigating apocalyptic culture, the show unveils the possibilities and aesthetics of a reality after human kind. Thus, it proposes a revelation: joy without nihilism, optimism without compliance, and fun without irony.
This performance is part of the RECLAIMING HISTORY Festival.
The term AZIMUT – from Arabic السموت , as-sumūt, is a term from astronomy. It means, among other things, “the paths”. Following the traces of colonialism, the young performers of the transnational ensemble Hajusom travelled to their countries of origin. They brought back stories and transformed their memories into choreography and songs, thus creating this multilingual performance.
This performance is part of the RECLAIMING HISTORY Festival.
Under the title THE CHILDREN’S PARLIAMENT, Belgian artist Michiel Vandevelde has been working on a series of projects with Hamburg children and young people between 8 and 13 years of age since the current season. DAS KINDERPARLAMENT is a democracy-building project that deals with the question of what human coexistence, but also the future of all living beings on the planet could look like or how it could be shaped. Michiel Vandevelde investigates what other social, economic and cultural alternatives can be imagined in order to question and change dominant logics and modes of organisation.
The world may be hiding in fear of the catching and the further spreading of the Coronavirus but QUEER B-CADEMY never closed down. Because queer knowledge continues to claim its place on this vulnerable planet Earth. TAKING TO THE STREETS focuses on the public space – a place many take for granted and others consider dangerous, and where they experience exclusion from society. Queer B-Cademy will be defying the mental lockdown. Binging on TV shows can wait. It is the ultimate preparation for reentering public space. A four-day program that will open up all of your energy spots. Air your mind and embrace your spring fever, summon the street spirits of the past, present and future with all the tales of queer life!
WE ARE STILL LOOKING FOR PARTICIPANTS!
The project THE CHILDREN’S PARLIAMENT by the Belgian artist Michiel Vandevelde is a play that deals with the question of what human coexistence on our planet could look like. It will be performed on 09 and 10 October 2021 at Kampnagel, and you can be part of it! Do you like to play theatre and do you want to experiment and tinker with video and sound? Then come to the workshop: Over the course of seven days you will paint the future, practise transforming into other beings, make costumes and shoot videos for the performance.
We are in the future. On the ruins of a failed democracy, small creatures try a reconstruction and test which tools they need to organize their environment. In a strange opening session of this new parliament, where sound recordings, film images, smells, objects and creatures of all kinds come together, the inhabitants of the city are invited to experience, question and construct. The CHILDREN’S PARLIAMENT an installation-based, interactive and multimedia long-term performance developed by renowned Belgian choreographer Michiel Vandevelde. The performance is aimed at younger and older audience members.
The artist collective Baltic Raw Org, with the active support of the Migrantpolitan team, has subjected the wooden house on the Kampnagel site to a general renovation. About the architecture: The redesign of the Migrantpolitan was done in the spirit of Bauhaus: »light, air and sun«, recyclability, circular economy & adaptation by the artist collective Baltic Raw Org. As a long-term and sustainable public space intervention, Migrantpolitan’s building acts as a transition from theatre and urban space. It is located at the intersection of neighbourhood use and cultural production, laboratory & studio, an eco-social retreat, in a word: a platform of possibilities.
Networking as part of the ACT project is an important segment, in which partners are sharing and discussing the activities’ state of the art. This meeting was organised and hosted by Culturgest, Lisbon with participation of other project partners and representatives from: Arts Admin/London, Bunker/Ljubljana, Kaaitheater/Brussels, COAL/Paris, Domino/Zagreb, Kampnagel/Hamburg, NTIL/Riga, Theater Rotterdam/Rotterdam, and Lokomotiva /Skopje.
In their first duet for the stage, the artists Rodrigo Garcia Alves and Liz Rosenfeld dedicate themselves to creating new ways of a community hospice. To do this, they weave objects, stories, projections and fantasies and create future worlds for each other through experimental dance, text and video practices. Hailing from Brazil and the US, Rodrigo and Liz met in Berlin almost a decade ago and began an artistic exchange about their own desires, experiences and stories associated with a queer position on death, dying and end-of-life care. What care options are there during this phase of life for queer communities and families who are not related? How do people want to be seen and perceived in this vulnerable phase of life? Together, the two artists met with diverse people who work with death in both pragmatic and creative ways, including a palliative care physician, a dying doula, a choir director, a bondage expert, and a tattoo healer. Inspired by these conversations, Rodrigo Garcia Alves and Liz Rosenfeld have built their current hospice, this duet for the present.
In 2017, Catherine Hoffmann’s ovary and fallopian tubes were removed after a 10-pound cyst was discovered in her abdomen — a cyst the size of a 22-week-old baby that she named Leonard. How did it get there? Was it the fault of the egg cell and follicle, or had Catherine herself conjured them up through underlying emotional causes? The director and performer recorded her thoughts and experiences in a diary, which would later form the basis for a show about illness, (re-)production, sexuality and aging. During the creative process, Catherine Hoffmann spoke to many other women about what she had experienced, immersed herself in the world of gynaecology and retrieved lost knowledge about the female body.
Even the biggest revolution starts with the smallest of shifts. Even a gesture can inspire us to strive for freedom. MOTIONS OF REVOLUTION is about the rights to one’s own body. Based on the numerous ongoing demonstrations against the repressive and conservative government course in some European countries, above all the abortion law in Poland, the new choreography by Maria Zimpel, who was born in Hamburg, focuses on the body as a political place. In the tension between glitch and continuity in the music of jazz minimalist Wacław Zimpel and the video of Australian radical choreographer Rosalind Crisp, the dancing body is dissected in its concentrated states. Maria Zimpel, who is always looking for physical challenges and creates new, sometimes utopian perspectives on the world through choreographic processes, wants to show in MOTIONS OF REVOLUTION that the dancing body has always been and will always be revolutionary.
The pandemic continues to polarise planet Earth. The weekly Corona Denialist Pride parades through the streets, accusing science and politics and proclaiming the end of freedom. From a queer point of view, this sounds strangely familiar – but those who still hope that the long-awaited queer turn will result from the lateral thinking movement will probably be disappointed… This is where the Queer B-Cademy will have to help in the future – that non-state-recognised educational institution whose highest task is to keep alive the perspectives, knowledge, struggles for survival and experiences of those who have been marginalised in the longest pandemic of this world: patriarchy.
A true tale of love and transition told through the story of Pinocchio. Set in a fictional film studio, you are invited to go behind the scenes of Cade & MacAskill’s creative process and their relationship, and question what it takes to tell your truth. Artists and lovers Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill have been creating The Making of Pinocchio since 2018, alongside and in response to Ivor’s gender transition. In this ‘funny, clever and thoughtful two-hander, rich in playful imagery’ (The Guardian) their tender and complex autobiographical experience meets the magical story of the lying puppet who wants to be a ‘real boy’.
Hamburg 2027: For the ceremonial opening of her artistic directorship, Mable Preach literally reviews old and new pioneers. The grande dame of emancipatory theater welcomes us to the grand gala of self-empowerment. Authentic empowerment, artistic talent and inclusive practice over the past decades have paid off: Mable Preach follows in the footsteps of Amelie Deuflhard, Gordana Vnuk, Res Bosshart and Hannah Hurtzig to lead Kampnagel into an artistic future! INAUGURATION NOW celebrates a future that has already begun: diverse, inclusive, intersectional and mercilessly successful.
Under the direction of Chilean choreographer and expert for crowd choreographies, Jose Vidal, 40 dancers from the Hamburg HipHop Academy and the Contemporary Dance School come together for a flashmob-like large-scale event in a dance intervention in public space. Based on the structure of flocks of birds, schools of fish, and herds, the work asks what invisible threads or multidimensional networks (tramas = tissue) must be at work so that a multiple organism emerges from the sum of individual bodies that is more than the sum of its parts.
In TUTTO BRUCIA (Everything burns), exceptional actress, dancer, DJ and Gucci model Silvia Calderoni is once again on the Kampnagel stage – this time alongside dancer Stefania Tansini and R.Y.F. (Francesca Morello), who provides the live soundtrack to this tragedy, which is as contemporary as it is dark, loosely based on »The Trojan Women of Euripides«. It begins with the end: on the scorched ground of the just-fallen city of Ilion, the women of Troy mourn the death of those closest to them, and face their future as spoils of war and slaves. In the context of the humanitarian catastrophe in the Mediterranean, climate change, and the global pandemic, the agonies of the Trojan women inevitably become readable as a political indictment of our present.
LEMNISKATA is a dance piece for 14 male dancers and one female performer who portray the origin of life based on female symbols from Mexican culture. With the movements of their naked bodies they visualise infinity. An impressive stage set, sound design based on prehispanic instruments, colourful human-animal masks and live music make this new work by Mexican artist Lukas Avendaño an experience for all the senses.
After the decline of the shipping industry in New York City, the piers stood empty and decayed, but quickly found new life as venues of artistic and sexual expression (cruising) for New York’s gay men. The photographs and accounts from that time bear witness to that brief historical period when queerness could finally be lived with pride and the debauchery of gay sexuality was still untainted by the public stigma of HIV. Together with her performers, the exceptional actress and director Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo, a researcher in gender studies and a dramaturge, examine the lore of these places with regard to the potential they hold for a community of bodies without norms, which is characterised by a longing search for community, a caring in the midst of strangers, but also by excess and freedom of rules. THE PRESENT IS NOT ENOUGH is the contemplation of a “past that becomes a foretaste of the future”.
Latai Taumoepeau is an Australian artist. Her body of work spans more than a decade of presenting cathartic works about the impact and injustice of climate change on low lying islands of the Pacific Ocean. She centered her indigenous concepts of faiva (performance) and fonua (land/body) in her contemporary work to raise awareness and empathy for front line coastal communities. Latai is fully evolving her art practice into a deeper relationship of body and land advocacy through mitigation and adaptation; expanding her cultural performance practice to that of her ancestors for the next ten years. She brings a strong message of sustainability from the global south. Latai lives on the land of the Gadigal and sovereignty was never ceded.
Queer B-Cademy is a performance art installation, a festival-esque gathering and exchange of intersectional perspectives, a practice of queer utopia and futurism. The festival includes multiple art genres and results in a temporary diverse sanctuary for queer people of all ages, identities and beliefs. Sharing knowledge and experience with everyone is a big part of it that takes place in workshops, at the bar, during a queer version of the Game of Life or on the dancefloor to some house music. There is also performance art and dance pieces, concerts, visual art, installations, talk shows and dj sets. The objective of Queer B-Cademy revolves around the notions of knowledge – Which/whose knowledge is being validated? Whose experiences are left outside academia or generally speaking outside the public narrative? It takes inspiration from the works of José Esteban Muñoz and Fatima El-Tayeb who both connect the necessity of visionary queer concepts and a close and sharp look at the present situation of the diasporic PoC and migrant communities in Germany and Europe.
Within the Performative Book Fair (Hamburg), British artist Ama Josephine Budge opens a portal for time travelers with the APOCALYPSE READING NOOK HAMBURG, a traveling mini-variant of her installation “The Apocalypse Reading Room”: Upon entering the cabin, visitors* find themselves in an apocalyptic future – with the invitation to delve into texts that do not primarily look back to what was, but rather try their hand at dreaming as well as practical guidance to new worlds. Stay as long as you like, you have time.
With this 3-day workshop during Hamburg’s May vacations, graphic designer, street art and tattoo artist Hanadi Chawaf invites Hamburg youth to embellish the Kampnagel facade with political art. You like to design and paint, and the protection of species is close to your heart? Over the course of three workshop days, you can create a mural depicting birds that are threatened with extinction here and now in Hamburg. After an expert talk about the threat to biodiversity posed by climate change, the urbanization of natural habitats, and human intervention in protected areas, you and the other participants will select the birds that should not be forgotten by humans and should therefore become part of the mural.
Curated by the world’s premier, green, autistic drag queen Oozing Gloop, Tentacular Spectacular is an (ad)venture into networking networks of narrative, phobia, hope and utopia by showcasing the self made cryptids of 21st century trans* performers. Oozing Gloop is joined by the architect of your eternal suffering, Olympia Bukkakis. Together, these Jesters of the new Dark Age will lure you through a psycho-sexual swamp of fester, rot & future relics. Emerging from this decay are the fruitful offshoots of this tentacular undergrowth; Shrek666, Bonnie Bakeneko and a mystery guest artist working with themes of monstrosity & mulch.
A performance tour through the Kunsthalle’s collection – and into the abysses of the art and finance world, including angels and the undead. Walid Raad’s exhibition merges several historical and fictional realms, revealing images of clouds that appeared mysteriously on the back of several Old Masters, cups that attract specific types of arthropods, and angels that self-restore.
A wet terrain that is the stage and the training ground to find out how to become like Ophelia – embodying the laws that govern a special environment to satisfy the desires and fantasies of others. Water is the element of assimilation and adaptation, a symbol of the limitless capacity for expansion, of an eternal, inseparable unity with the outside world. Symbolically, water is associated with femininity – and with death. An oceanic landscape emerges, full of illusions, cultural and historical references to all kinds of aquatic creatures and drowned strangers, a scenario that not only asks the question… whether training and exercise can help us escape the precarious conditions of the present with climate catastrophes and other disasters to come. It also invites speculation about future life forms that have assimilated these conditions, transformed them and created new forms of being.
