DEAD

Beauty and the Beast is a fake band, a dance performance, a party, a workshop, a movie and a lifelong collaboration between the choreographers Amanda Apetrea and Halla Ólafsdóttir and some of their friends. Their latest dance performance is called DEAD.

There is a story that tells of Beauty and the Beast’s fascination with their own shadow. They kept looking at it, pecking at it, scratching it, fisting it, burning it, licking it. Until one day their shadow woke up, became alive and ate them. Beauty and the Beast are now “DEAD”.

DEAD is a pornographic poetry reading and dystopian dance performance that merges the beauty of darkness and the in-between. Apetrea and Ólafsdóttir play with existing conventions and friction that occur when merging high and low culture art forms, such as poetry and contemporary dance, together with the raw power of the two rock star alter egos that came to life in their previous work with Beauty and the Beast. Wearing makeup that brings out their inner demons, the performers move in death rolls, screaming at forgotten fears and squirting blood, licking the audience and contacting the dead.

The duo unfolds and confronts the shame that often lingers around female sexuality and explores bodies that dare to shamelessly take up space. Using expressions of sexuality, body and gender they flirt with the power of horniness and lust. A power they believe can move mountains. They have the desire to find the poetic and the beautiful in what is usually considered ugly, disgusting and forbidden. They look for stuff that generates joy, sorrow, anger, hope and infinite desire.

Beauty and the Beast collaborates with the composers and musicians Zhala Rifat, Karin Dreijer and Linnéa Martinsson that write music to Apetrea’s and Ólafsdóttir’s poetry in DEAD. They are three different artists that have smuggled dance and choreography into their stage performances. The three of them have feminist practices and create music on their own conditions and with fuck loads of integrity.

DEAD will be performed under consent in agreement with its audience, which means that anyone who enters agrees to whatever will happen during the show. It also means that anyone can leave at any time. As always it is about you and them and all the love in between.

The performance explores ways of connecting with an audience and blurs the boundaries between performers and spectators in order to create a feeling of togetherness. Apetrea and Ólafsdóttir will insist on their mantra “we are into that an audience feels that they have experienced something important, that feeling of “no tomorrow” and that the party should go on forever.”