ROZENSTRAAT X ADE Performances

In collaboration with Amsterdam Dance Event, ROZENSTRAAT opens its doors for three evenings, each featuring a new performance.

The three performances stand on their own, each arriving from somewhere else, yet all circle around desire, loss, and the conditions under which we try to live and love.

Thursday 22 October, 18:30: Eloy Cruz del Prado, Working (Título)

Friday 23 October, 19:00: Wynnie Mynerva, Sidario

Saturday 24 October, 19:00: Erik Tlaseca, Eclipse

Click here to buy your tickets: €8

Eloy Cruz del Prado, Working (Título)

We start our three-day performance program with Working (Título) | Cuddles are not enough, I need to be under your nails, sharing space with the dirt of your labor by Eloy Cruz del Prado. The performance points to a desire for intimacy that involves tenderness but goes beyond it.

Through the sound of a waltz, a dance associated with coupling, but here danced with a hammer, and the words of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, in which desire, shame, and precarious living conditions are inseparable, the work treats affection and waged labor as entangled.

The work asks how the material conditions in which we work and live shape the ways we love and care for others. What does intimacy look like when exhaustion and economic pressure are part of the relationship? Rather than separating love from work, the performance lets them share the same space, suggesting that care is never free of the conditions under which it is given.

Wynnie Mynerva, Sidario

On the second evening of ADE Arts & Culture, ROZENSTRAAT presents Sidario by Peruvian artist Wynnie Mynerva. Blood and a white shroud are the central materials of Mynerva’s performance, which is inspired by Loco afán: Crónicas de sidario (1996) by Chilean writer and performer Pedro Lemebel. In this work, Lemebel describes the lives and mortality of gay and trans people during the AIDS crisis.

In Sidario, HIV is addressed not only as a medical condition, but also as a social and political issue. Mynerva brings together HIV, sex work, gender, racialisation and death with the exclusion and neglect experienced by certain bodies. Buh, a term used within trans communities in Peru to refer to HIV, appears as a virus that enters the exhibition space from the street and, as it were, ‘infects’ it.

Drawing on drag and club-kid aesthetics (an extravagant and avant-garde fashion and lifestyle subculture that emerged in New York nightlife in the late 1980s and early 1990s), as well as ritual elements from the Andes, Mynerva pays homage to Lemebel while giving his work new meaning from a contemporary Peruvian and trans perspective. Sidario makes visible how bodies excluded by social systems continue to manifest themselves and persist.

Erik Tlaseca, Eclipse

On the final evening of the performance programme, we show Eclipse by Erik Tlaseca. In the performance, we encounter two characters: a child and a vampire. These apparent opposites both long for connection, understanding and care. The vampire becomes a figure for the desire for those fleeting moments of pleasure and intimacy that remind us that we are alive, precisely in a world where certain bodies and lives risk becoming invisible.

The eclipse is the starting point for the work. In colonial Mexico, the phenomenon was represented by Indigenous artists as the moment when the sun closes its eyes; the sun did not disappear, but rather we disappeared from its sight. From this perspective, Tlaseca asks to what extent our memories remain present, and whether we can return to them.

Eclipse grew out of a series of letters that Tlaseca wrote from a deep longing for connection. At the same time, the work reflects on loss and desire, and on the ways in which we might reinvent ourselves when there is no way back to our origins. As Tlaseca writes: “When darkness falls completely, there’s a different kind of light.”