Bik
Toneelacademie Maastricht – Performance
Snippets of early morning radio stations and late night internet explorations are glued together by breakbeats and pounding kicks, accompanied by a live drum performance of an angry goldfish that cannot speak. Part of the soundscape are the smartphones of the visitors, which create auditive layers by joining one of the several livestreams. Aggressive visuals tell the story by interacting with the music, using live software that reacts to the audio.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bik creates performances that are inherently off, in a style that doesn’t connect with anything and make use of an impractical mix of techniques, media and technology. Bik puts himself and the audience, within the framework of his current environment, into a multidisciplinary situational experience in which everyone’s comfort zone is at stake, and where the simplicity and context can often be worked out in a single glance, but interpretation and imagination are ironically left to the audience. Sexuality, love and hate, self-mutilation, existentialism, escapism and contemporary culture are recurring themes in his work, explored through digital platforms, public space, nightlife, fashion, music and sound, graphic visuals, living installations and edited footage, in which the exact combinations of these media typically tell the story.
Loud, grim, sarcastic, dreamy, sunshine and thunderstorms, simplistically complex and unreliable by reason of insanity.