‘’Pain doesn’t always scream. Every so often, it just sits there. Silently.’’
A Tribute to Everything That Breaks is a multidisciplinary revealing of violence and eroticism in a colorful psycho-dystopian world: physical, emotional, aesthetic, and symbolic – seen through the female-coded anime body. This solo performance (±35) – performed by Yoko Haveman – explores the fractured psyche, perception, and hyper-sexualized bodies of archetypal figures: the Innocent, and the Tragic Temptress – characters whose storylines are often shaped by implosion or sacrifice.
Inspired by illustrations by Toshio Saeki, Anime: Ghost In The Shell, Perfect Blue and philosophical thinkers about destructiveness: Hannah Arendt, and Simone De Beauvoir.
Through performance, voice, and live guitar, this work does not merely depict violence and eroticism, it listens to it, gives it space, and follows its rhythm through character (de)construction, embodiment, and pitch. A new character emerges, forming a physical language of rupture and resistance, literally and figuratively. The voice experiments between high, oppressive frequencies and deep, raw exhalations, interwoven in layers with live guitar and a psychedelic scenography design.
Dance, sound, lighting design and scenography are influenced by the exaggerated dramatics and raw, colourful landscape of anime. These mediums come together to reveal that we need not fear the taboo of violence and eroticism, but that through confrontation we can move through it, use it in order to excel.
A Tribute to Everything That Breaks is an ode to a renewed representation of the diverse and changing female body and an invitation to see breaking not as failure, but as a form of clarity and development.