Past shows: 7/9/2025 at Vrije Ruimte festival 2025 ‘Mega Open House’ at Plantage Dok / Plantage Doklaan 8-12, 1018 CM Amsterdam
Premiere on the 15th&16th October, 2022, at Queer Festival at Theater Het Pakhuis Hoorn.
‘Peace to be’ is a participatory and partially immersive performance tickling the senses of touch, vision, and hearing. The presence and experience of the audience is a part of the performance, however no one is forced to do anything else than to decide; consent is essential. The piece stems from the constraints of a gender-non-conforming/non-binary/gender queer person living amidst gendering and labelling. Although frustration is one of the initial driving forces of the piece, it wants to transmit intimacy, playfulness, and togetherness. It is queer in its content and form, and can only fully exist with an audience.
Concept, performance, voiceover, editing: T. Veneranta
Sound and assistance: Jonathan Nagel
Original version:
Photos and videos: T. Veneranta, Enno de Vos
Assistance: Enno de Vos, Theater Het Pakhuis Hoorn
Thanks to: Stichting Queer Art Productions, 4bid gallery Amsterdam, Theater Het Pakhuis Hoorn
The piece includes paradoxes and wants to playfully challenge, question, and provoke our habits and thought patterns to create peace, openness, and safety. It strives for everyone to be seen as a person, not as a gender. However, I acknowledge that you might have been, or still are, working hard to be seen and accepted as who you truly are, perhaps to be finally called a woman or a man. Words matter, with their absence and presence.
Quoting Judith Butler (check transadvocate.com for thought-tickling interviews and material), I do not wish to eradicate genders but I do not wish them to be imposed on anyone either. Precisely as there are desires to be addressed as a certain gender, there are desires not to be addressed as any gender. At first, I wanted to encompass the multitude of lived non-cis-experiences in this performance, but that turned out to be impossible and is probably redundant too. So I returned to what I can relate to and how I possibly can contribute to the discourse of (gender) diversity. The process is, of course, far from finished, and I am not interested in presenting one truth or a manifesto, but to provide some food for thought and reflection, to myself too.
Although making work around the topic of gender or queerness is close to my heart, quite consciously I have also decided not to go there. Because of my identity, anything I do or make in life is inherently queer (for instance, ‘Angels, upside down‘). In the end, I decided to take on the offer of Stichting Queer Art Productions to jump onto this boat more explicitly. I am grateful for this opportunity and its challenges.
In contrast to body dysphoria, I am my body and name as much as possible but I often experience that the way I feel or think about myself does not correspond to outsiders’ views or assumptions about me due to my “female body”. I am at peace with this. Had I been born “male”, chances are high that I would feel the same as the entire concept of gender feels foreign to me. I desire to be. Judgment, biases, and assumptions are humane, however some power structures in our society can be changed and challenged, thus making the environment more accepting for all human beings.
Staying curious about my body and being my own playground are important to me. Dance, training, and performing are suitable grounds for doing this and having possibilities to be someone else, yet dance has also led to a fair share of body-insecurity and self-demeaning, partially due to my “femaleness”.
Even though the performance has a “performer”, they are only a catalyst for creating as many experiences as there are participants to the happening. For future, the work might be developed into a more immersive direction, taking the participants to a physical path through different spaces and enable them to tailor their own experiences.