Artist, nun, social worker, activist — Sister Karen Boccalero (1933-1997, Los Angeles) wore many hats. Or should I say, habits? She always wore pants, never a habit, always spoke her mind, always. She drank, smoked, and cursed. She was not your typical nun. In “Boccalero”, three dancers summon her contradictory personality. A tribute, a cover song, an ode to a woman who refused to be easy. In this work, dance becomes commemoration, incantation — an aggressive devotion to a fictionalized figure.
Infos
- Duration: approx. 60 minutes
- Language: English
- 26.02. Stern Barabend with stellacci & kemdoesitagain afte the performance
- 27.02. artist talk afterwards
- World premiere
- Mousonturm co-production
Sponsors and Supporters
Choreographie und Performance: Liza Baliasnaja, René Alejandro Huari Mateus, kemelo nozipho sehlapelo und Laura Stellacci
Kostümbild: Reiner-André Törner
Musikproduktion: Paolo Stellacci
Lichtdesign: Laura Salerno
Sounddesign: Antonia Alessia Virginia Beeskow
Textarbeit: Nouria Behloul
Outside Eyes: Alexandra Hennig, Jacq Azarmi, Viktorija Ilioska
Künstlerische Produzentinnen): take the money and run GbR
HMWK Ottillie-Roederstein-Nachwuchsstipendium
Biographies
Laura Stellacci’s work involves dance, costumes, textiles and sound. By translating textile methods such as knitting, cutting and sewing into other media, Laura choreographs the ties between narrative structures, everyday gestures and embodied technologies. So far, she has made two staged works, a series of radio shows, a performative listening-format and a VR-video based on a choreographic interpretation of a collection of garments.
Over the past decade, Liza Baliasnaja has been active as a choreographer and performer, working between Germany and Lithuania. Her work deals with themes of power, violence, and subjectivity, with a recent focus on the political power of negative emotions. In 2025, her performance Chiaroscuro was nominated for Lithuania’s highest theatre award, the Golden Stage Cross. She is a recipient of the Young Artist Award from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture. Her latest work, Shield is a Weapon, premiered at Tanzhaus NRW. Her practice is shaped by collaborations with artists such as Eszter Salamon, Christine De Smedt, Lenio Kaklea, Lina Lapelytė, Ula Sickle, DD Dorvillier, and Mårten Spångberg. Together with Rūta Junevičiūtė, she is co-facilitating an ongoing workshop series/research project, Sore Spots, addressing how unresolved history manifests in the body. She regularly teaches practical and theoretical courses at Hochschule für Musik und Tanz/ZZT, University of Cologne, and the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. She studied dance at P.A.R.T.S. and philosophy at KU Leuven. Since 2023, she has been based in Cologne.
René Alejandro Huari Mateus is working in an institution again. Actually, she jumps from one to the next as a freelancer, in survival mode, like Mario Bros. When she returns to an institution, there are new faces, others have stayed, everyone is working hard – and every new crisis shifts the question from “What can we improve?” to “How do we keep going at all?”. Even she herself – whether unchanged or changed – asks herself the same question again and again as she walks through the institutional buildings: Under what conditions is belonging even possible? The feeling of being a stranger to an institution is hardly any different in the nervous system from the feeling of being a stranger to Germany: vigilance, self-observation, a slight state of alertness. As Sara Ahmed writes: the stranger is not simply the one who is not known, but the one who is already known as not belonging
kemelo nozipho sehlapelo is south african. african. a medley of IsiZulu, Sesotho, and Ndebele. a medley of all the places and spaces they have touched. they/she, if we’re using the English language. her name or other ways of referral, if not. likes to play with this language and its inherent failure (writes). likes to conjure ancestral AND diasporic reckoning on european soil, and likes to access that knowledge through aliveness of body and spirit, on African soil (dances). is based wherever their root chakra is, which for now, is in Frankfurt, germany.