Cabaret 30.09.23 - 01.10.23, 19:00 - 21:00 Entry: Pro Abend 18/14€

herbstkabarett

with Julie Béna, Jessika & Jimmy Khazrik

Guest production

For the second year in a row, steirischer herbst turns to cabaret and its capacity for gritty, gutsy social criticism. Six performances present a mix of burlesque, street chanson, stand-up, and macabre poetry in the intimate setting of Forum Stadtpark’s basement.

Curated by Mirela Baciak
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ʼ23

'
PERFORMANCE TIMES:

- Saturday, 30th September: 19:00, 20:00
Julie Béna and Jessika & Jimmy Khazrik

- Sunday, 1st October: 19:00, 20:00
Julie Béna and Jessika & Jimmy Khazrik

Both performances are in English !

'
Tickets can be bought at the respective boxoffice 1 hour in advance or online here:

with Julie Béna, Jessika & Jimmy Khazrik

with Julie Béna, Jessika & Jimmy Khazrik

About the artists

  • Julie Béna with Stories of Rivers
    A cabaret about abortion? Impossible, or so it would seem, considering how terminations of pregnancy are still stigmatized as creepy and cruel. Julie Bénaʼs cabaret challenges this assumption. Joined on stage by her mother and daughter, she embarks upon a hyperbolic three-chapter show of stories, songs, mimes, and dances, aiming to elicit that little vibration right before screams of terror or laughter.

'
Julie Béna (1982, Paris, France) is an artist working with sculpture, installation, film, and performance. Her work draws upon an eclectic set of references, combining contemporary and ancient literature, high and low art, humor and seriousness, parallel times and spaces. In 2012–13, she was part of the Pavillon, the art research lab at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2018, she was nominated for the AWARE prize for women artists. Over the past years, Béna has developed personal cosmologies staging seemingly banal characters and objects that have enigmatic conversations and interactions with each other. She lives in Prague and Paris.

  • Jessika & Jamal Jimmy Khazrik with No Doubt Nisaba
    What if our memories were born before we were born, and we get to witness, time and time again, a call-and-response between our ancestral myths, transpersonal experiences, and contemporary science? In their musical contribution to herbst cabaret, Jessika and Jimmy Khazrik revisit matriarchal tales of love, exile, and ecstasy indigenous to the multimillennial literature and oral transmissions of their Chaldo-Assyrian ancestry. Taking the form of a stellar cabaret ritual with a multiplicity of voices performed by a granddaughter, a father, and an immaterial mother, the divisive materiality of time collapses as an illusion. The audience is warmly invited to join this endless search for transgenerational healing through interludes delving into the body’s organs of perception.
    '
    Jamal Jimmy Khazrik (1952, Baghdad, Iraq) has been a pioneer of the Lebanese nightlife scene for over fifty years, bringing people together in hybrid forms of storytelling. He began as a promoter of underground Armenian rock bands in 1960s Beirut, before becoming renowned in the 1970s and 1980s as a vocal jazz singer, club founder, and organizer under the moniker Jimmy Blue Bird. After a thirty-three-year hiatus as a musician, he has returned to performing in 2022 together with his daughter Jessika. His new work mixes vocoding and techno with stellar sci-fi stories ruminating on clubsʼ templar potential.
    '
    Jessika Khazrik (1991, Beirut, Lebanon) is an artist-composer, technologist, educatress, and DJ whose live musical practice is devoted to communal solace, collective transcendence, and transgenerational healing. Her sets are informed by ancestral chanting traditions skewed by quaint techno and incomputable, entrancing rhythms. Performing and exhibiting internationally in a wide range of venues from clubs to museums, theaters, and quarries, she uses spaces of congregation to search for locally entrenched universalisms that could collectively respond to the dystopias of our times.