“We are in an alien world. Only awkward movement is possible.”

–Bayo Akomolafe

Choreographer Cherish Menzo examines the figure of the monster in FRANK – short for Frankenstein. More than (re)producing a physical or visual portrayal of the monster, she is researching the monstrous as an embodiment of beliefs and narratives that terrify and horrify, and yet also attract us. Distortion, as a choreographic leitmotif, is used to generate movement material and as a tool to devour the dance, to loosen its structure. Menzo investigates the action of decay; how something, gradually breaking down and becoming less or worse, can affect one’s gestures.

The performance space fabulates on the Baka Gorong, a place located at the back of the former plantations and in front of the wetlands, where enslaved people in Suriname secretly went to carry out Winti rituals–demonized under Dutch colonial rule–and to consider fleeing.

Menzo is joined by Omagbitse Omagbemi, Mulunesh, and Malick Cissé – performing artists from different generations – to construct a performance somewhere between the ritual, the apocalypse, and the carnival, where narrated identities are challenged, where flesh can deviate and be corrupted until it bursts and becomes unbearable. The dancers express their standing in the world with incoherent, broken-down movement in a scenery that collapses around them. In an increasingly unstable world of hiccups and unlikely events, often gruesome and violent, we are reminded of early horror movies and this eerie feeling, the flicker in the dark.

FRANK is the closing of a trilogy, adding to Menzo’s previous works JEZEBEL and DARKMATTER, which were shown at Moving in November in 2022 and 2023. These shows form a trilogy that does not consist of chronological storytelling or a series of events, but maybe more a trifold of spaces, universes, fictions, and conversations that regard Blackness, bringing the Black body to the centre and attempting to explore the African Diaspora’s multi-intersections in recognizable, metaphorical, and abstract ways.

Familiarise yourself with the world of FRANK here.

Cherish Menzo (°1988, The Netherlands) is a performing artist and choreographer based in Amsterdam and Brussels. For her artistic work, she is interested in the transformation of the body on stage and in the “embodiment” of different physical images. Implementing distortion, decay, and dissonance, Cherish attempts to detach bodies from forced perceptions and their daily corporeal realities, underlining the complexity and contradictory nature of images that seem recognizable at first glance. Glitching the ‘’common’’ lexical, she seeks the Uncanny, the Enigmatic, and the Monstrous to give shape to – and materialize speculative forms and fictions.

Cherish graduated in 2013 from The Urban Contemporary program (JMD) of the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Amsterdam and since danced in productions by choreographers such as Eszter Salamon, Akram Khan, Leo Lerus, Hanzel Nezza, Benjamin Kahn, Olivier Dubois, Ula Sickle, Lisbeth Gruwez, Jan Martens, and Nicole Beutler. She has been creating her own work since 2016: EFES (2016 – together with Nicole Geertruida), LIVE (2018 – with Müşfik Can Müftüoğlu), JEZEBEL (2019), DARKMATTER (2022) and KILLED AND EXTENDED DARLINGS: SUBTLE WHINE in the frame of the research program Welcome To Our Guesthouse (2023) (Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam).

She received the Amsterdam FRINGE and FRINGE International Bursary Awards 2019 with JEZEBEL. JEZEBEL was selected in 2020 for both the Dutch and Flemish Theaterfestival, which presented a jury selection of the best performances of the season and received the prestigious Charlotte Köhler award by the Prins Bernhard Foundation (Amsterdam) in 2022.

DARKMATTER was selected for both the Belgian Theater Festival and its Dutch counterpart. With DARKMATTER, Cherish received the BNG Bank Theater Prize (2023) and the Dutch Drama Jury prize for best direction (2023). In October 2024 she won the Gieskes-Strijbis Podium Prize 2024, the Netherlands’ largest stage prize, aimed at mid-career makers who contribute to the quality and diversity of the performing arts in the Netherlands.

Cherish Menzo is one of GRIP’s artistic leaders. GRIP is a dance organisation led by choreographers Femke Gyselinck, Jan Martens, Steven Michel and Cherish herself.