Submerge Labs: In Residence – GÆRALD

Artist in residence GÆRALD develops material for their new show X ! (un opéra fantastique) with Manchester practitioners, performers and activists.

As part of Submerge Festival 2022 international artist GÆRALD will develop their new work X ! (un opéra fantastique), in collaboration with a variety of Manchester-based practitioners, performers and activists. GÆRALD will be in residence at Contact for the duration of the festival.

X ! (un opéra fantastique) is an anticipation fable, a hybrid experience blending video-games, story-telling and vocal electronic music in which Gérald Kurdian unfolds the objects of research initiated together with an ensemble of practitioners, performers and activists who use sex and alternative intimacy to heal.

Its main materials are photographs and films contextualised as the potential fragments of an anticipation movie: the chronicles of a bewildered anti-hero, on his way to meet a community of radical lovers trying to cure themselves from advanced capitalism.

The show will debut at Kaaitheater in Brussels in 2022.

HOT BODIES CHOIR

All of the work created by GÆRALD is broadly part of their HOT BODIES OF THE FUTURE! project; a collective, a record label & a production house for the alternative utopias to come.

Within the frame of HOT BODIES ON THE FUTURE! an online version of their Hot Bodies Choir project was produced by Submerge in 2021. Hot Bodies Choir is a unique global project bringing together queer, trans and non-binary young people in cities around the world to develop revolutionary new queer texts and music. Participants work together through collaborative writing and choral singing workshops with artist Gérald Kurdian to premiere new Hot Bodies Choir tracks at their live shows, and also perform material from other choirs around the world.

When preparing a live concert, the Hot Bodies Choir generate and develop new writing inspired by famous radical queer and feminist manifestos. These unique, polyphonic and unruly new manifestos form the basis of a choral score, musically arranged by the artist and performed live by all the participants in a sensational live electronic concert.

The Manchester Hot Bodies Choir connected queer people in the North West during the Covid-19 lockdown. In May 2021 their first single OIL FORMING RAINBOWS was released by French label and collective Les Disques Du Lobby.

CREDITS

This residency is kindly supported by Contact.

Concept & performance
Gérald Kurdian

Sound technique
Justine Herbert

Choreographic advice
Arantxa Martinez

Production
Tiphaine Gagne / Oh la la mgmt
Hot Bodies of the Future

Coproduction:
Kaaitheater / Brussels (Be)
Tanzfabrik / Berlin (De)
Bandits-Mages / Bourges (Fr)

Supported by Institut français / French Ministry for Culture / DGCA
Village.berlin
APAP-Performing Europe 2020 / Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the Eurpean Union.