Tiran Willemse
blackmilk (film)
vidéo
- 21'
- F Hearing-impaired spectators welcome
- A Little or no text
- B Accessible to persons with reduced mobility
This version of blackmilk is a video interpretation of the same title live performance, at its workshopped stage. The live performance was presented in march 2024 at Arsenic, during the festival Programme Commun.
blackmilk – performance
blackmilk is the first performance of the Trompoppies trilogy, created by Tiran Willemse.
Derived from Afrikaans, “Trompoppies” refers to the drum majorettes in uniform. The performance disects one of the choreographic elements of the formation dances they perform: hand gestures. By fusing the movements of these drum majorettes with the melodramatic gestures of white femme starlets and gestures associated with black male rap stars, the work explores the distance between images of African and African-American male-presenting bodies.
blackmilk intervenes in this limited repertoire of representations using performativity. Tiran Willemse explores a variety of affective bodies in what can be understood as grey areas of legible identities, opening them up to a complex sensibility that the artist describes as a “black male melancholy”. In this tense performance, the performer, a virtuoso with a haunting, inhabited gaze, overturns conventions and shifts the spectator’s gaze to the margins.