DIVAS is a queer duet and pop-up space for collaborations, for becoming, for transformations.
DIVAS is performing
DIVAS is a duet based on a mutual interest in practice and knowledge connected to queer life, magic, healing, love, witchcraft, feminism, gay culture, pop music and more. We create events/performances based on finding forms of dialogue with an audience and multimedia material including movement, sound, video, objects.
"Let’s be careful with each other so we can be dangerous together."
In CLINICA DE DIVAS TRANSFORMATIVAS we develop our skills as fake healers and fortune-tellers. Providing a platform for individuals to experience dancing, poetry reading, touch, and other forms of being together that we are open to discovering with every single person.
A diva became for us a synonym of ‘your best self’ full of light and beauty beyond the ideas and the pressure imposed by the mass media. A diva is above it. A diva takes care of herself and the others, she shares. No shades, just light.
Life is not a performance or a catwalk but it doesn’t mean we are not DIVAS.
It’s inclusive. The word diva is open again. What you feel and who you are is important.
The Soap
She’s got the power. Gently purifying. Easily collaborates with the others, especially with waters. Very social person, though her strength is to cut through and set things clear if necessary. Her wisdom comes mostly from women and she is growing to be a wonderful witch. She loves adventures and involves herself in urban rituals. You can meet her in underground clubs softly helping others to shake their trauma on the dance floor. She comes in different colours and shapes.
*WARNING: jak się wkurwi to się pieni
The Mask
She’s got the vibe. Sweet and strong, transformative shape-shifting witch. Better have her blessing. Holding onto people’s faces makes her so glam, so fab, so what. When she is in trance she can get deep into your skin and that's usually really good for you. Extending beyond human touching, she is a kinda Goddess tuned with many planets, universes, and far-reaching galaxies. Soft and compassionate, yet once she peels off her skin- well, better watch for those hips and lips. They can fill. You. Up.
The Shower
She is the one that saves us. Her gentle showers will sooth the worst dryness of the heart. She works, works, works and makes things happen. With a smile and set of superpowers.
Nothing stays dry when she's around. If you're nice she knows the right way for things to be. Stay nice cause you don't want her to be too hot on ya, too cold on ya.
The goddess of sound. Her waves are vibrating through the space transferring the powers of divas even into the most remote places. With her help, darkness turns into light.
Water whispers to Shower deepest secrets and she drops it onto all of us like it's hot.
clinica de divas transformativas
clinica is a format that appeared as a continuous development of DIVAS project during Horizontbearbeitung Festival in Westflugel Leipzig in January 2017.
we set up a little tent on the stairs of the theatre, filled it with warmth, sound, objects and smells. individual visitors could sign up for a session when arriving to the festival. during two days we had about 8 visits lasting between 20-30 minutes each.
clinica is a format that gives a possibility for a more direct, sometimes even intimate contact with the audience. during the session we empathize with our visitor, starting a continuous flow of exchanging information. we try to be gentle as well as daring to find the right way to be together in this unusual situation. clinica is an art practice and not a therapy room or a hospital nevertheless we use concepts connected to healing, body work as well as poetry in order to tell each other stories, find hints about creative ways of healing oneself or just experience a sensation. we try as much as we can, by turning to embodied listening, to make this experience for the visitor, but still it is also about us. it is about us because clinica serves as a platform to share our DIVA ways to heal and be. the ways we devote to every day by reading, moving, travelling, talking to friends or remembering our grandmas' favourite herbs.
even though it is a personal experience we are tuning to, clinica informs us about collective/communal aspects of healing. by agreeing to continue this practice wherever we go as DIVAS we dig into current ways of dealing with your own body and its poetic life. we are interested in what past/present and maybe future traumas and joys of the people and the place might be from that very intuitive but emphatic, artistic perspective.
then again, because of the context and uniqueness of every human being clinica de divas transformativas is a flexible format that is open to go through transformations itself. inside the clinic we might have a party, poetry reading, casual conversation, fortune-telling cabinet, embassy of forgotten dreams or simply a tea.
Instant Ritual
In the frame of the same festival in Leipzig we were given time and space on the main stage of Westflugel theatre to create something that we called for that time ‘instant ritual’. We started off with tuning in to our current moods and interests. what became important very soon was the balance of filling the event with content and at same time creating space for things to emerge by themselves. First we needed to understand the space in order to feel what kind of energy is suitable for it, what kind of stories emerge from simply spending time with it, like you spend time with a friend. by doing so as well as by talking to people that work there we collected stories from the past. We found out that the theatre used to be a ballroom before it turned into a factory producing pipes which also set up a specific relationship to the place.
In the end the event became something on the border of installation/concert/workshop/participatory performance and a ritual. as playing with those different frames of the art/social situation interest us a lot we were constantly shifting between roles of a performer/facilitator or a dj. Opening the space so much for different possibilities creates kind of uncertainty and vulnerability which is definitely something to get used to and practice. we treat it as a practice, hoping that in that way the audience is able to experience some sort of change of transformation too without being pushed to do it. Nevertheless it can be a space of confrontation both for us and for the audience.
DIVAS are preparing to a resdency at TanzHaus Zurich in November 2017. We are starting our new work
>Forget before you wake up remeber to call me later<
DIVAS will also be in residency at Message Salon hosted by Madame l’Ambassadeur from November till end of January in Zurich Nord, you can follow it here:
http://messagesalon.ch/ and here Message Salon follow us for more occasions in Zurich this winter!