HANSeL/GReTeL

H/G is a participatory ritual performance of the classic fairytale embedded in a party at a club.

Using the transformative, healing potential of a bumping dance party and the radical possibility in revisiting and rewriting a pervasive children’s story, H/G offers a space for participants to dig up and work through the story’s cultural roots, unraveling ancestral trauma, the heteropatriarchal home, and white supremacy across borders.

As attendees enter the club to mingle, buy drinks, and dance, an interactive audiovisual setting invites participants to don the identity of Hansel and Gretel, who lose the “trail of breadcrumbs” to their motherland and collectively journey into the forest. Through the improvisational art of conduction, the DJ’s live-mixed set is pegged to the story’s arc by plot points revealed through dance music, soundscapes, and spoken word. On a screen, visuals remix popular interpretations of the tale, while a performer creates specific moments: the hungry Mother sulks across the dancefloor; the Witch spins yarns by a cauldron; the patriarchal home beckons, door open.

The show is a framework designed to change night to night, which concurrently holds multiform pieces that we as lead artists have no control over.

The party’s outcome is in the hands of the participants, who might team up to direct a shared ending, or each choose their own. H/G wonders what would happen if every person in attendance was simultaneously the main character and the storyteller, envisioning beyond the bullshit "happily ever after."