Imagine a PowerPoint presentation: half-heartedly inspiring words about recovering from postnatal depression. Then wrecking balls. Something about searching for God. A grunting choir. Lukewarm finger food and pop icon Slutty Suzy performing a hyperpop banger about having children in a hopeless world. A white-noise machine. What begins as an uplifting speech about overcoming an existential crisis explodes into liberating noise…
Weren’t we once promised a future of stability and progress? Instead of prosperity, peace, and the fruits of the tech boom, all systems now seem on the verge of collapse. Climate catastrophe, wars, fascism: we are living in an age of polycrisis. The constant stream of news is getting impossible to process and keeps us in a state of permanent stress. How can our senses learn to cope with this overload without going numb? In the intensely immersive performance opera NOISE, Club Gewalt dives right into the static of apocalyptic forecasts together with the audience – and sings at the top of their lungs against it. The goal: learning how to love being human again.
Club Gewalt is a music-based performance collective from Rotterdam. Driven by resistance to injustice and a love of togetherness, they create, compose, produce, and perform their own works: from feminist punk Christmas musicals and melancholic operas about institutional racism to club nights in museums and political slutpop concerts. Always musically virtuosic, witty – and somehow delightfully uncomfortable.
