Warning: The performance contains loud sound, fog, and strobe effects that may affect individuals with photosensitive epilepsy.

Unhuman, nonhuman, inhuman, something of a strange or terrifying shape, a deviation from the normal, an imaginary creature, the hybridity we cannot comprehend, a threatening otherness, making the Self perish. The monster, not as an appearance and physical shell but as a shared fantasy, excites choreographer Cherish Menzo in her latest piece, FRANK, a co-production of One Dance Festival. The title, like the English word for honest, direct or Frankenstein's short, is the final chord of her trilogy, in which the leitmotif is the distortion and dissolution of reality, hence of dance.

In the final part, Cherish explores the tangle between the monstrous and the human. These “evil” creatures - zombies, mythical heroes, demons, ghosts, beasts - are our creation. They are metaphors for scary but also compelling narratives. They are ghosts of dusty beliefs, reflections of fear, and offspring of the unknown, given their particular visual traits, behaviour patterns, voices, speech and even movements. The figure of the monster exists to be defeated, tamed or repelled. Through it, an idea of the Other, the enemy, the other, the oppressed is constructed. If we can understand the monster, won't we also understand the people who invented it? In their respective times and narratives, historical eras and social constructions?

FRANK seeks the answers in the preliminary phase, in the process of creation, when the monster, that is fear, receives its image and resemblance. Humans, as Nigerian philosopher and activist Bayo Akomolafe says, cannot be separated from monsters. It is always part of man - and vice versa. And here the choreographer from Belgium is not looking for a critique, but a representation of the impulses of the imagination when painting the characters of horror, when detail by detail we create the shape of our monster to fight.

FRANK is a performance between ritual, apocalypse and carnival, and to heighten the impact, Cherish Menzo uses prosthetic make-up with masks and implants, while on stage the set also falls apart. Three performers embark on a disjointed dance of decomposition - of performance and movement - and one of them takes the lead as a narrator to guide us into the unknown. With the triple impact of text, music and dance, with the aesthetic of the dusk before the sunrise, Cherish Menzo plays with the tension of the unknown and uncertainty of the world we live in.

As Julia Kristeva defines horror as a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of boundaries between self and other.

...I would like to deviate from the monster being something we must overcome, conquer, master, cast off, etc. I am curious to research this process of bringing the pre-monster stage or horror into a metaphoric embodiment and for that process to be the generator of image-making and the performative, sonic and text material that plays with the tension of ambivalence, uncanniness, enigma, and uncertainty. 

Cherish Menzo

Following on from JEZEBEL and D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER, in FRANK the distortion of reality will once again be one of the main ingredients for creating the choreographic material. Rather than consisting of chronological storytelling or a series of events, the trilogy looks more like a triptych of different spaces, fictions and conversations related to Blackness, the African body, the African diaspora and its multifaceted interweavings in a literal, metaphorical and abstract sense. 

FRANK arrives in Plovdiv days after its world premiere on 22 May in Brussels.

Cherish Menzo (1988, The Netherlands) is a choreographer and dancer, who lives in Brussels and Amsterdam. In 2013 she graduated from The Urban Contemporary (JMD) at the ‘Hogeschool voor de Kunsten’ in Amsterdam. Cherish has appeared in the work of Lisbeth Gruwez - THE SEA WITHIN, Jan Martens - THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER, any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones, Nicole Beutler - 6:THE SQUARE, as well as collaborations with the likes of Akram Khan, Ula Sickle, Olivier Dubois and Eszter Salamon. Her powerful movement language also comes into its own in her own work, which tours internationally.

In 2016, she and Nicole Geertruida made EFES, an exhausting duet in which perfection and fallibility raise intriguing questions about how we like to see human beings. Sorry, But I Feel Slightly Disidentified... (2018), a solo made by Benjamin Kahn for (and with input from) Cherish, was an attempt to create a cartography of how we experience and meet the other. The seeds for this production were laid within the framework of Fraslab, after which an artistic dialogue between Cherish and Frascati Producties was initiated. Hereafter, Cherish made LIVE (2018), a cross between dance performance and pop/rock concert in collaboration with musician Müşfik Can Müftüoğlu.

In 2019, Cherish worked at Frascati Producties on JEZEBEL, a dance performance inspired by the phenomenon Video Vixen from the hip-hop clips of the 90s. Jezebel, a contemporary hip-hop honey, refuses to be defined by others and shakes off her image by deconstructing and redefining it.

In May 2022, during Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER premiered, a duet in which she and Camilo Mejía Cortés, with the help of the distorted rap choir, search for ways to detach their bodies and the daily reality in which they move from a forced perception. In the context of D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER, Cherish also gives workshops on the chopped & screwed technique, a process from hip-hop music that Cherish applies to the moving and performing body in the performance. As part of Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam's research programme Welcome To Our Guesthouse, Cherish made KILLED AND EXTENDED DARLINGS: SUBTLE WHINE in autumn 2023, an audiovisual performative landscape that embraces the subtle nuances and mechanics of gyration.

In continuation of JEZEBEL and D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER, in FRANK, distortion will once again be one of the main ingredients to generate material. In addition, Cherish will look into the action of decay and discover how something gradually breaking down and getting less or worse can be another attempt to distort a form or information.

Cherish received the Amsterdam FRINGE and FRINGE International Bursary Awards 2019 with JEZEBEL. JEZEBEL was selected in 2020 for both the Dutch and Flemish Theaterfestival, which presented a jury selection of the best performances of the season and received the prestigious Charlotte Köhler award by the Prins Bernhard Foundation (Amsterdam) in 2022. D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER was selected for both the Belgian Theater Festival and its Dutch counterpart. With D̶A̶R̶K̶MATTER, Cherish received the BNG Bank Theater Prize (2023) and the Dutch Drama Jury prize for best direction (2023).

For her artistic work, she is interested in the transformation of the body on stage and in the “embodiment” of different physical images. Implementing distortion, decay, and dissonance, Cherish attempts to detach bodies from forced perceptions and their daily corporeal realities, underlining the complexity and contradictory nature of images that seem recognizable at first glance. Glitching the ‘’common’’ lexical, the lexical of the speaking being, she seeks the Uncanny, the Enigmatic, and the Monstrous to give shape to – and materialize speculative forms and fictions.