NEXT - Lola Arias: Androgynous. Portrait of a naked dancer

Welcome to NEXT! For three weeks, 20 Belgian and French art and culture houses join forces for a unique, cross-border arts festival. NEXT immerses you in an adventurous mix of theater, dance, and performance with international artists who do not care about borders or pigeonhole thinking. View the full program at nextfestival.eu. One hundred years ago, Anita Berber made the nightclub an avant-garde place, with her body as a symbol of sensual resistance. Berber is a legendary figure from the counterculture and perhaps the first naked performer in stage history. Her boundary-shifting art, in which eroticism and gender fluidity come together, embodies the creative fever of the Berlin of the 1920s. Yet her work was almost completely erased by the Nazi regime. Of her bewitching performances, which were often reduced to a scandal, only press reviews and police reports remain today. Regisseur Lola Arias creates together with performer and pole dancer River Roux a daring work at the intersection of documentary theater and choreography. Together with Bishop Black, a former homosexual porn actor, and Dieter Rita Scholl, a transvestite in her seventies, River Anita brings back to life and lets the enchanting beauty of her dance revive. By also weaving their own lives into the work, the three artists defy taboos again with their bodies, while the threat of censorship and making invisible emerges again. PRACTICAL: 4:30 PM: DEPARTURE BY BUS AT CC HET SPOOR 6:00 PM: PERFORMANCE 7:45 PM: END OF PERFORMANCE 8:30 PM: EXPECTED RETURN IN HARELBEKE