Josse Jnr.

LOD / Ahilan Ratnamohan
Thu 10 Aug - Fri 2 May
10 Aug
-
2 May

Josse Jnr. is the first collaboration between Ahilan Ratnamohan, Josse De Pauw & Etuwe Bright Junior. The result is a performance about the complexity of language, migration and soccer. A personal story of a former soccer player who found his way into theater.

"Whether this Tower of Babel ever reaches the sky is highly questionable, but Josse Jnr. shows that building it can be meaningful enough. Without spectacle, kitsch or sentimentality, rather gentle brutalism." – Etcetera


"In that magical sight of a clash between (black) body, text and sound that is so incongruous for a Western audience, there is actually everything. The realisation that anything can be anything, and all at once: black, icon, white, language artist, newcomer, footballer, theatre maker. It is a masterful way of not talking about it, and yet telling it all." - De Theaterkrant


"Ahilan Ratnamohan talks about Josse Jnr. on The Summer of Klara. "We explore what it means for Junior to speak Josse's words. Who is allowed to speak which register of language? What does it mean as a migrant to pronounce Josse's lyrics?" Listen to it here." - De zomer van Klara, Klara 

In Josse Jnr., theatre-maker and performer Ahilan Ratnamohan, together with Josse De Pauw and Etuwe Bright Junior, investigates language learning and the inevitable power relations that arise from it. What can De Pauw's texts, stylistically so European and abstract, mean on another body? How can these texts and aesthetics - which by now have largely defined the Flemish canon - reach another poetry? Is Flemishness transferable?
 

Credits

concept, direction & performance Ahilan Ratnamohan
text & performance Josse De Pauw 
performance Etuwe Bright Junior 
dramaturgy Petar Sarjanovic
costumes Anne-Catherine Kunz
technics Timme Afschrift & Gilles Roosen
production manager Liesbet Termont
production LOD muziektheater & ROBIN vzw
coproduction Theater Kampnagel Hamburg, Explore the North / PAFFF Leeuwarden
with thanks to Monty
with the support of the tax shelter measure of the Belgian federal gouvernment 
tax shelter partner Flanders tax shelter