this is hardly an invitation.

this is a perishing party...
this is a festivity lab...
this is hardly an invitation


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a performance by/with Hillary Blake Firestone & Morsanek
i.k.v. My Name is Spinoza Festival

Grand Theater Groningen May 19 @ 20.30h
Frascati Amsterdam May 22, 23 @ 21h

Light design: Floriaan Ganzevoort
Thanks: Keren Levi, Mara Tomanek, Jeroen Kimman, Jordis Jabuzichek

Made possible with the support of SKOR, Grand Theater Groningen, DWA and the Violet Bureau

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We need maracas
We need mutton
We need garish
We need gaudy
We need a reason to get drunk on a Tuesday
We need a reason to be childishly guileless
We need a reason to get in a fight
We need a reason for ABBA
We need a reason for orange
We need to practice being a corpse
We need a reason for marzipan teeth
We need fringe
We need food fights
We need a reason to think about decay
We need a reason for love letters
We need a reason for lapdance
We need a reason for limbo
We need a reason to get in over our heads
We need seduction
We need surrender
We need a reason for human target practice
We need a reason to spike the punch

this is hardly an invitation is a collaboration between sound artist Morsanek (aka Mark Morse) and choreographer Hillary Blake Firestone. Commissioned to create a performance inspired by Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs, the two distilled from the text the unlikely combination of festivity as theme and laboratory as location. Joined by light designer Floriaan Ganzevoort, the group inaugurated a Festivity Lab, a liminal space devoted to testing the mechanisms of celebration.

The performance itself takes place within this oddly clinical disco. Exploring the imaginative flow and reconstructive energy that define festivity, the performers propose dry-humoured experiments where various hypotheses are tested…some of which are bound to fail.

The result is equally visual, musical and physical: a solo parade; a funny-sad spectacle; a lonely party for two people and their public, tinged with the recognition that within every celebration, along with the eternal, there is an inevitable suggestion of the perishing. Hoera.

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Hillary Blake Firestone (USA, 1974) is a choreographer, performer, and teacher, based in Amsterdam since 1999. After studying Dance Performance/Composition and Literature in New York, she began making her own work, first with the dance/theatre collective Unexpected Company. Since moving to the Netherlands, she has worked in collaboration with choreographers, composers, musicians, and visual artists. The relationship between movement and sound is one of the primary focuses of her work. To this end, she often makes use of simple objects and complex music.

Mark Morse aka Morsanek (USA, 1969) is an improvising guitarist, DJ, and sound editor who builds his own source material through a variety of prepared guitars, customized software, and feedback generators, and then painstakingly assembles dense narratives that draw on techniques from film editing, field recordings, and DJ mixing. His new LP on the Dutch label Kazemat has been called "a fascinating puzzle" (Gonzo Circus).

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