Batty Bwoy

Please note: This performance contains nudity, is sexually explicit and contains loud sounds. Recommended age of audience: 18+ years. Seating is unnumbered.

Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “ Batty Bwoy” (litteraly, butt boy), slang for a queer person, the work twists and turns myths to invoke demonic sensitivities and charming cruelties, unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety. The horror and joy of Batty Bwoy, inherent to queer blackness, is unmasked.

Scrutinizing the absurdity of a queer monstrosity, Batty Bwoy articulates the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the corporal fictions projected onto their skins.

Batty Bwoy attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body as a perverse and deviant figure. The expression “Batty Bwoy” is used to evoke an ambivalent creature that exists in the threshold of the precarious body, liberated power, joy and batty energy!

The work has found inspiration in mythologies, disgusting stereotypes, feelings and fantasies of the queer body and identities, homophobic dancehall lyrics, 70s horror Giallo films from Italy, resilient “gully queens” and queer voices in Norway and Jamaica that have visited and taken part of the process.

“Batty Bwoy” won the Hedda Award for best dance performance 2023 and was nominated for the Norwegian Critics Association Prize 2022. 

Batty Bwoy is a solo performance in collaboration with Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, Jassem Hindi and Ring van Mobius.

The project is a co-production with Dansens Hus, Oslo and RAS, Sandnes and premiered January 20th, 2022.

LANGUAGE:
The performance is non-verbal.

Harald Beharie(he/they) is a Norwegian-Jamaican performer and choreographer based in Oslo, Norway.

Harald’s choreographic practice are collaborative voyages, navigating through realms of ambiguity and phantasm, punctuated by themes of deconstruction, hope and uncertainty, disinterest and emotional intensity.

They hold a special interest for the DIY and the vulnerability of being in the unknown. Beharie is interested in how the body can function as a motor for dramaturgy—a force in itself that transforms through practice. In his works Batty Bwoy and Undersang—he has engaged with monstrosity as a tool for empowerment. By playing with disgust and transgressive energies, he challenges established bodily narratives about the Black body. He allows ritual to be the transcendent force within his practice, opening up to the unknown—the clumsy, the uncanny, and the awkward in-between spaces where understanding slips, and new possibilities emerge. A vibration is created—one that builds over time, an energy that becomes increasingly unbearable, twisting between the comedic and the unsettling.

His work also explores friction, longing, and deep listening — how small “glitches” can disrupt our perception and open up unforeseen ways of being and moving.

Haralds work has received nominations for the Norwegian Critics prize for the performances ” Shine Utopians” with Louis Schou (2020) and the solo work Batty Bwoy (2022). In 2023 Batty Bwoy also won the Hedda prize for “best dance production” and in 2024 the project “Undersang” won the Norwegian Critics prize 23/24.

Harald’s work has been presented in museums, galleries, festivals and contexts including:

Impulstanz, Santarcangelo Festival, Gessnerallee , Sophiensæle, Les Urbaines, SPRING festival, Kampnagel, Centrale Fies, Donau Festival, MDT, ADC- pavillion, Zodiak , Salmon Festival, Kanti Gildi Saal, Fierce Festival, Fabricca Europa, Actoral Festival, Theaterfestival Basel, Skopje Pride, Black Box Teater, Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Nasjonalmuseet, Oktoberdans BIT-teatergarasjen, Vitlycke, Dansens Hus, Oslo, Munch Museum, Oslo, Vigeland Museum, Oslo, Galleri Entrée, Bergen, Tou Scene, Stavanger, Ravnedans, Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo, Øyafestivalen, Oslo and Trondheim Kunstmuseum.

More information at haraldbeharie.com