Cherish Menzo, FRANKperformance

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PLEASE NOTE: The performance uses strobe lighting , haze and loud music.

FRANK is a performance by choreographer Cherish Menzo with four dancers. It is set against a paired-down scenography in which sound, light, costumes, movement, and projections of text snippets create a complex and compelling experience.

The movements in FRANK play with repetition, disruption, morphing, decay, and distortion. They investigate and draw inspiration from Jab Jab, a Grenadian tradition and symbol of Black expression and liberation, and Winti, an Afro-Surinamese belief system, spirituality, and philosophy. The soundscape includes live versions of the Jamaican dancehall tune BamBam and the Surinamese children's song Faya Siton, as well as a recording of Aisa De Na Baka Gorong / So Wadyo / Pityin Begi Mama by Anne Goedhart. The latter highlights Baka Gorong as a central articulation point for FRANK – a place that lay behind the Dutch plantations in Suriname, in front of the wetlands, where enslaved people gathered in secret, performed Winti rituals, and imagined their escape.

FRANK as a title connotes both honesty and directness but is also a reference to Frankenstein’s monster from Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel. Text excerpts from this book appear in dialogue with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, which both analyse the lasting psychological impacts of slavery and colonialism, alongside fragments from George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 and Wes Anderson's sci-fi comedy Asteroid City.

Cherish Menzo (born 1988, the Netherlands) is a graduate of The Urban Contemporary at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Amsterdam. As a dancer, she has collaborated with leading choreographers such as Jan Martens, Eszter Salamon, Akram Khan, Voetvolk, Leo Lerus, and Ula Sickle.

As a choreographer, she creates performances that challenge and reimagine how images and narratives of the body are constructed, often using dissonance, distortion, and glitching to provoke alternative and speculative perspectives. 

FRANK is the third in a series of free-standing performances by Cherish Menzo, where JEZEBEL and DARKMATTER were shown at Dansens Hus in 2021 and 2023, respectively. FRANK has its Norwegian premiere at MUNCH, and is a collaboration with CODA - Oslo International Dance Festival.

The dancers in FRANK are Cherish Menzo, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Mulunesh, and Malick Cissé.