Join us for the latest provocation by Thais Di Marco, your friend The Goldfish Bleeding, the Roma Queer director who’s been happily terrorizing the region, with an angry team, sharp laughter, and a burning desire to set some ghosts free.
THE OBSESSORS — EXORCISM SHOW
The Obsessors is inspired by the ancient Umbanda ritual of desobsessão, a Brazilian spiritual practice that takes place every Friday in open, free-of-charge sessions. This ritual cleanses individuals of “lost dead souls” that fuel obsessive behaviors such as power struggles, gossiping, opportunism, lack of desire and sense or purpose. In these ceremonies, spirits perform their final dance and negotiate their liberation, simultaneously freeing the person being cleansed.
The project explores how to translate this dramaturgy into a contemporary popular performance capable of “cleansing” theater spaces and institutions – transforming them into what we would like them to be, while releasing lost souls arrested there for ages. The work reconnects artists and audiences with practices lost due to historical fractures like forced displacement, adapting them to contemporary issues such as ecological mourning, neoliberalism, and burnout.
Thais employs their methodology, Retelling Structures, which replaces key elements to destabilize dominant frameworks. Through critical entertainment and comedy, they open space for reenacting social conflicts, creating a window for grief, release, and dreams of the future. One of the core principles of Thais’s work is “to mobilize pain until it turns into possibility” to keep looking at the invisible and make what is unseen yet deeply felt – manifest.
— Bebel Carvalho
Bebel Carvalho, daughter of the sea goddess Yemanjá, was born in the countryside of Brasília in a religious community of Afro-Indigenous-Catholic cosmologies. Third generation of a family of ritual composers, Bebel works between singing, choreography, and stitching, merging political, cultural, and spiritual forces. Their research engages imagination, transformation, magic, and resistance, seeing the body as an entanglement of invisible worlds. They graduated in Dance at ZZT Cologne, studied with Anti Status Quo Company, DDSKS, and International University of Peace, and have performed internationally at Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf, Ruhrtriennale, Teatro Vila Velha Salvador, and MNAC Barcelona.
— Neslihan Kaymak (she/her)
Neslihan Kaymak is a Mimer, theatre-maker, and Sumi-e artist whose practice draws on the natural and cultural heritage of Alevism. Working through intuition, ancestral knowledge, and collective experience, she uses the body as a channel to invoke inherited energies and to create resonances between self, space, and communal memory. Her interdisciplinary approach combines physical theatre, visual arts, and storytelling to engage with themes of identity, heritage, and transformation.
— Hannah Rojer (she/her)
Hannah Rojer is a performer, teacher, and community worker. A self-taught dancer, she approaches movement as a somatic practice and a form of personal activism. Passionate about working with groups, she focuses on radical community care and collaborative creation. Hannah is honored to co-create this piece alongside diverse performers under Thais’ guidance, whose work she deeply admires.
— NANA
NANA is a 25-year-old Franco-Cameroonian artist, performer, and contemporary dance teacher based in Amsterdam. Her work blends Hip-Hop, floorwork, theatre, and poetry, engaging the body as a site of memory, resistance, and transformation. Drawing from her mixed heritage and lived experiences, she creates performances exploring identity, discomfort, community, and self-determination.
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