Cherish Menzo

The scene is set for two dancers clad in mirror-reflecting masks. With ceremonial care, one covers the other’s torso with a dark liquid. An extended blackout marks the scene shift, interrupted by a glitchy break: a performer’s face is revealed, and is promptly strobed out. This stop-and-start rhythm, pressing against linear time and blurring identification, stems from choreographer Cherish Menzo’s deep dive into the archival sounds of hip hop’s “Chopped and Screwed” genre, born in the 1990s from DJ Screw’s Houston-based studio. As such, DARKMATTER experiments with the embodiment of these slowed-down tempos. Distortion becomes a significant choreographic tool for Menzo to remix representations and warp them, upside-down. Indeed, working with the materialities of bodies invites cosmic questioning, channeled through afrofuturist and posthumanist speculations. Dark holes above become portals into seas below. DARKMATTER concocts this threshold where gestures, like perceptions, melt and move, “boneless / formless”.

Cherish Menzo

Cherish Menzo is from Brussels and Amsterdam, and she is one of the artistic directors of the GRIP dance organization with Femke Gyselinck, Jan Martens and Steven Michel. Menzo performed as a dancer in pieces by Lisbeth Gruwez, Jan Martens, Nicole Beutler, Eszter Salamon, Benjamin Kahn and Akram Khan, among others. Her powerful physical language is fully expressed in her choreographic pieces, which tour internationally. She looks for new modes of being and moving which place beauty and the grotesque on an equal footing; she investigates new ways to use distance to bring herself and spectators away from what is known and familiar and what is too easily considered as “the only reality”. She is inspired by industrial hip-hop and the nostalgia for 1990’s and 2000’s hip-hop, as well as rap lyrics and manga or speculative fiction. In 2019, she created the piece Jezebel and in 2022 DARKMATTER, deux pièces which was programmed in the Flanders Theaterfestival and its Dutch equivalent.