Harald Beharie: Batty Bwoy

Batty Bwoy is a solo performance in collaboration with Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, Jassem Hindi and Ring van Mobius. Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “ Batty Bwoy” (litteraly, butt boy), slang for a queer person, the work twists and turns the myths of the queer body 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 through dance 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 Giallo films from Italy, resilient “gully queens” and queer voices in Norway and Jamaica that have visited and taken part of the process.

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

BIO: Harald Beharie

Harald Beharie (b.1992) (he/him/they) is a Norwegian-Jamaican performer and choreographer based in Oslo.

While applying various formats and contexts his practice looks into alternative modes of being, dancing and existing together while questioning notions of normativity. Harald holds an interest for the unpolished, the DIY and vulnerability of being in the unknowing. His choreographic practice unfolds in various constellations with other dance and visual artists.

Some of the artists he has collaborated with are Kristin Helgebostad, Francois Chaignaud, Ingri Fiksdal, Bouchra Ouizguen, Pieter Ampe, Marcelo Evelin, Hooman Sharifi and Mia Habib. From 2016–2019 he was also a part of Carte Blanche - The Norwegian National company of contemporary dance. Together with Julie Moviken and Charlott Utzig he is a part of the performance collective De Naive. The group mainly works with dance practice as soft activism - inviting and invading public space with social performances.

https://haraldbeharie.com