Ivan Cheng
Nowadays
Ivan Cheng’s Nowadays emerges from the artifice of theatre to examine how the figure of the criminal or dissident is produced and romanticized - through representation, spectacle, and their seductive force.
Programme section Julidans On Stage
Dutch premiere
Location Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Venue Auditorium
Duration 70 minuten
Language Engels
Ticket sales start later on via stedelijk.nl
Nowadays
The work is informed by two culturally dispersed narratives that have each had lives as successful Broadway musicals: Chicago, based on Maurine Dallas Watkins’s play—set in 1920s America’s Jazz Age, following two felons who recast their stories in pursuit of celebrity status—and Spring Awakening, based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play set in 19th-century Germany, centering on teenagers who, amid puberty and emerging sexual curiosity, face psychological instability and adult intolerance. For Cheng, both stories are driven by forms of misunderstanding and factual obfuscation: the gap between what happened and how it is told.
-|-Working with an interest in making theatrical devices visible, and in heightening the audience’s awareness of the space between material and interpretation, Cheng fractures and reassembles these references into something more unstable—a framework for thinking about image production, identity, and the mechanisms by which a person may become spectacle.
For the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Julidans, Nowadays takes place in Stedelijk’s auditorium, where scaffolding structures serve as a fourth wall: a permeable boundary between performer and audience that makes the act of looking, and of being looked at, central to the work itself.
SEE MORE & SAVE!
During Julidans, you can experience multiple performances in a single day. Enjoy an abundance of dance and make your festival visit truly complete. The more performances you book, the greater the benefit. Receive 10% off when booking 2 different performances, and 20% off when booking 3 or more different performances.
In addition to Nowadays on 4 July, you can also see on the same day:
- Chara Kotsali - It's the end of the amusement phase
19:00h, Theater Bellevue - Armin Hokmi - Shiraz
21:00h, Frascati - Nicole Beutler Projects - ROOM IN OUR HOUSE
21:00h, Podium Mozaïek
-|-In addition to Nowadays on 5 July, you can also see on the same day:
- Serge Aimé Coulibaly - Back to Kidal
20:30h, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam - Armin Hokmi - Shiraz
21:00h, Frascati - Nicole Beutler Projects - ROOM IN OUR HOUSE
19:00h, Podium Mozaïek
Ivan Cheng
Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney, lives and works in Amsterdam) works with genres, languages, and their readings. Interested in the ambient and implicit, his performance work incorporates the site of presentation into a system for formatting text and historic references, often using the video camera as a structuring device. The process of making the work is related to accumulation and caching of information – memory between performance terms and machinic terms. His practice is variously represented by video, installation and publications.
Credits
Performance, text and staging Ivan Cheng
Camera Arvo Leo
Set design Leander
Garments Good & Bad (Marina M. Kolushova, Victor Stuhlmann, Ossi Lehtonen)
Coproduction Tanzquartier Wien, Shedhalle Zürich
