The second week of the Queer New York International Arts Festival (QNYIAF) is currently ongoing, whose program was opened by Croatian artists, and is continued by artists from Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Germany
7. – 17. 2. 2024., NYU Skirball
The Queer New York International Arts Festival is currently underway in New York, co-organized by the Domino association, whose president, Zvonimir Dobrović, is the curator of the festival, which gathers around thirty artists from Croatia, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Germany. The festival started with a series of plays from Croatia by Bruno Isaković, Nataša Rajković and Mia Zalukar and an exhibition by Arijana Lekić-Fridrih, and the prestigious The New York Times also published a review for the play Kill B. this week. The festival takes place at the NYU Skirball, one of New York’s largest theaters that regularly presents world-renowned artists.
In addition to the performances, lectures were organized for New York University (NYU) students, numerous talks with the audience and additional lectures at the NYU Tisch School for the Arts.
The festival hosted the Argentinian artist Tiziano Cruz and his performative lecture “Conference”, based on autobiographical memories of his sister’s death and memories of his Andean ancestors. Tiziano Cruz is an artist who is rapidly gaining recognition worldwide, he is currently on the cover of the German theater magazine Theater der Zeit, and his performances are planned for the upcoming Avignon Festival. The performance in New York is his first appearance in the USA at Queer New York, a fact shared by many artists who have performed at that festival so far.
Also, there was a conversation between the Brazilian artist Wagner Schwartz and the head of Performance Studies at the NYU Tisch School for the Arts, as an introduction to the performance of the play “La Bête”, with which Wagner is a guest at Queer New York. It is a performance that requires audience participation in the gestures of joint creation of this intimate and emotionally powerful performance. In 2017, the body’s openness to audience participation cost Schwartz brutal attacks from the Brazilian right, including from then-President Bolsonaro, which resulted in hundreds of death threats to summoning the curators of his play to a hearing before the Brazilian Senate. Wagner wrote a book about the whole experience, with the support of PEN International, which came to his defense, along with many other international organizations, as well as the cult Brazilian singer Caetano Velos.
Closing of the festival
The festival closes this Saturday and is in a way dedicated to a special man of dance art: Raimund Hoghe, a German choreographer, dancer and conceptual artist who once collaborated with Pina Bausch as a playwright, and who died in 2021. In his honor, Luca Giacomo Schulte and Emmanuel Eggermont in the play “An Evening with Raimund” reunite his longtime collaborators, from opera singers to contemporary dancers, in a new dance performance woven from fragments of Hoghe’s famous choreographies.
The QNYIAF festival questions traditional definitions and understanding of queer through artistic practices, concepts and/or forms. The starting point on which the artistic platform of the festival is built starts from the idea of queer as a place outside the norm and the fact that the mentioned norm depends on the geographical, social and political context. This long-term engagement of queer art and the Domino festival program is a strong and loud response to the re-traditionalization of art and society that is happening in societies around the world.
The festival program is available at:
https://nyuskirball.org/queer-new-york-international-arts-festival/