Caroline Beach is a German based, Texas born artist, choreographer, performer, and occasional musician who might best be described as a cartoon artist working with wrong mediums. She has made work for a multitude of spaces including theaters, galleries, off-spaces, public spaces, the Internet, a media storage closet, a beach, and a de-functionalised bank. Her work is not at the intersection of anything but rather looks at practicing meaning-making in the contested space between the arbitrary and the profound, the living and the living dead. She is interested in technology as human, the politics of nonsense, internet horror micro-genres, dance as dissociation as activation, and sifting through the wreckage. For the past several years she has been making work through Sailor, who is a kind of human-algorithmic processor trying to navigate an infinite archive of shipwrecks and who does not actually possess a boat. Right now she plays in the bands Halloween Boyfriend and Cocktail Napkin.
Untitled Shipwrecks 8-99
ongoing work // speculative archiving of performance and media fragments
In Darkness Let Me Dwell is an installation performance and horror musical centred around the split second before a doomed queen is fated to lose her head. The performance arranges itself around this imminent act of violence, played out both by and onto the state, like chess pieces in a deterministic game with ambiguous morals. Motivated by a common goal of inventing witchcraft and therefore defeating the sun, all will inevitably succumb to the darkness. Funeral doom, renaissance lute, and drone drive the players in and out of feedbacked loops of time, and the interplay of video and live performance pull them in-between life and death. Failure is certain but there is a kind of emancipation in being freed of the head, in founding a state of headlessness, or: the devil is a great escape artist but sometimes they need our help.
Developed for Musik Installation Nürnberg
Caroline Beach: concept, direction, video and sound editing, performance
Elena Louise Bastert Feuerhake: styling, costume, make-up, objects, and performance
Sini Pfalzer: video production, editing, and performance
Benno Elender: renaissance lute and performance
Lares (band): original music composition
And the performers: Noemi Calzavara, Eva Jaekel, Elke Stein-Nagel, and Talaj Szöke
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A project conceived by Caroline Beach in collaboration with:
Sini Pfalzer, Eva Jaekel, Wesley Schchemayer, Ingeborg Wie, Hannah Rumstedt, Carina Hajek, Christian Novopavlovski, Steph Qunci,Julia Kunde, Jinx Rüger, Saida Makhmudzade, and Sophia Lökenhoff and Ton Angler Ernst Markus Stein. Video stills and artwork by Sini Pfalzer
Originally supported and documented by Lisa Marie Baier
you don’t even like it here
Is an ongoing dialogue between Sailor and the Angel of Information. Biblically accurate angels appear to kill everything except for the vibes. Sailor does not consent to being hijacked by an eternal being who knows everything that is going to happen, who watches with an infinite number of eyes. But listening? Listening is for the living and the dead.
Performed at West Germany (Berlin), Maxi Haus as part of OUT OF SPITE (Nürnberg), and Villa Wigman (Dresden). Film installation shown in Taipei on a street billboard, curated by Dresden Mediennetzwerk.
Performance, text fragments, objects, and video
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JENNIFER FOR A DAY
A collective consisting of Caroline Beach, Laura Morales Davila, Steph Quinci, Jinx Rüger, Amelie Sabbagh
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all haircuts are sacred
2023-present, sound performance, installation, haircut. Performed by Caroline Beach and Lucie Friedericke Müller
a performance that offers small contracts of transformation. From its vital roots to split ends, hair encodes personal history and ferries this information between the living and the dead. A haircut then is a chore, a ritual, an indulgence, an exorcism: the necessary shedding of self. In order to address not only the physical but the spiritual accumulation of dead tissue, the hair cutters make use of a range of real and invented tools. Looking at the undervaluing of “feminised labor” and the disparities of transactional care, this performance seeks to create a space where every gesture no matter how arbitrary could be exactly the right one, and therefore all haircuts are sacred.
ContentContent, the musical
Caroline Beach + Joseph Hernandez
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Is a musical about millennial malaise in light of the death of history. Hosted by two 90s trapped in a hermetically sealed Ted Talk, the musical vaguely following the story of a down and out clown who lost their way after the 2007 financial crisis. Choosing to get lost with the clown, they move through the promise of suburban America, sell sex in dead malls, meet the Ambassador of the Early Internet, and dissolve into the oblivion of the Windows ’95 screen saver. In the future that never materialises they sing a song about Nietzsche and Bojack horseman, or: you can throw your arms around the neck of just about any horse to go mad.
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A sailor* must find a temporary boat in order to navigate the precarious waters of narrative, but what resources are available to a crew this cute? A hanging garden, a negative affirmation, a curated time-travel through various melancholias.
A Sailor* can make special offers for the possible versions of reality piled at their feet, but the winds from paradise are always blowing in the wrong direction and messing up their hair. A Sailor must use razor sharp pop logic and their own dead futures if they want to stay afloat out here. Ahoi!
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„Unterstützt durch das NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ - STEPPING OUT, gefördert von der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien im Rahmen der Initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Hilfsprogramm Tanz.“
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SONDERANGEBOT was a series of performances for a spaces that included a boat, a church, a radio show, and the internet. It took the material of an existing artistic work, SAILOR ON AISLE 5, and imprinted this work onto different surfaces. This spwaning of the material and corrosion of informations produced distinct instances in which that were embedded in each other. Supported by NPN Stepping Out, Studio DB Berlin, Hosek Contemporary Gallery, Herrfurthplatz Kirche, Monsters Believers, Cashmere Radio, and C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts Dresden.
In collaboration with the performers Jossia Clement, Laura Morales Davila, Valerie Ebuwa, Joseph Hernandez, Christian Novopavlovski, and Steph Quinci.
Stage and Costume by Jinx Rüger and Amelie Sabbagh.
Video Art by Lucie Freynhagen.
Production and Artistic Assistance by Ana Dordevic.
Photos by Ilia Osokin and Simon Findlay.
"Sailor on Aisle 5" follows five performers on an identity parkour through the precarious waters of contemporary culture.
A sailor* can be one or many and is both a skin and a set of tools for interweaving ideas, objects, persons. Moving in and out of being, these Sailors navigate their way through various aspects of our daily existence and the commodification of the now. The Sailors find themselves in the eventuality of a supermarket in which all markets, campaigns, and histories have been evolved to the hypsperspace of the white box. They build ephemeral bridges from the personal to the hyperreal to the mythological and use dance, humor, and pop music to explore alternative futures that are embedded in the past.
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In collaboration with the performers Jossia Clement, Laura Morales Davila, Valerie Ebuwa, Joseph Hernandez, and Steph Quinci. All texts performed in the piece authored by the performers themselves.
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Stage and Costume Design: Amelie Sabbagh + Jinx Rüger
Video Art: Lucie Freynhagen
Film and Edit: Ian Whalen
Artistic Assistance: Ana Dordevic
Concept, Choreography, Music: Caroline Beach
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A production by Caroline Beach in coproduction with TANZPAKT Dresden.
Under the patronage of the City of Dresden, Office for Culture and Monument Protection, the association Villa Wigman für TANZ and HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts cooperate in “TANZPAKT Dresden”.
Funded by TANZPAKT Stadt-Land-Bund with the support of the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Saxon State Ministry for Science and the Arts*, and the City of Dresden.
*This measure is co-financed by tax revenue on the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon state parliament.
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does sailor dream of electric dolphins?
videowork for the Technische Sammlung Ausstellung ‘Mind over Matter’ January 2021
​Filmed at the Technische Sammlung Dresden and the C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts. Concept, direction, film, sound, and editing by Caroline Beach. In collaboration with the performers Christian Novopavlovski, Casey Ouzounis, Markus Stein, Augusta Vickunaite, and Lucie Freynhagen.
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Sailor_Log: the third ocean
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Sailor_Log: the Third Ocean was a collaboration between Caroline Beach and the artist Ernst Markus Stein. They went sailing and researching together in Ljubljana, Slovenia in a residency coordinated and made possible by En-Knap Dance Group, Hellerau Europäische Zentrum der Künste Dresden, and Tanzpakt Dresden. They were influenced by the people they met in Ljubljana, the history of the country, the architecture that they said hello to on their walk to the studio, and the way that ‘thank you’ rhymes with Koala in Slovenian. Their research has focused on finding the overlaps and distances in their respective fields, building bridges through old mediums and writing new languages that are better than compromises.
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https://tanzpakt-dresden.de/residenzen/sailor-log
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http://swimmer.hopto.org/enabled/index.php?id=sailor_web
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Host Body Cabaret: a pop-up performance
was a Pop-up performance. Supported by the TanzNetzDresden. And the C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary arts. Hosted by hi-jacked bodies on the edge of biological separatism. Temporary alliances formed by giving high-fives to low frequencies. Performing body drag for an audience of poetic napkins. Wipe off your humanity and reclaim your fish spine. Fish nets are free radicals and even the orchestra is beautiful. At any given moment the threat of an outbreak of song dance or botulism looms large. Hybrid sensations seduce with a slow stripping of binary definitions. Prosthetics. Prophetics. And all that jazz.
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https://www.crockefeller.org/allgemein/02-10-2019-host-body-cabaret/
AnnieQuinn
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AnnieQuinn was a multi-disciplinary performance series developed by Caroline Beach and Ian Whalen in collaboration with the artists.
https://www.instagram.com/anniequinn_inc/
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This Diamond Salt-Lick Future
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final work for MA Choreography Palucca
in collaboration with the costume and stage designers Amelie Sabbagh and Jinx Rüger
OPOTFOTF: a sensational soap opera musical
was a collaboration between the choreographers and performers Caroline Beach, Susan Schubert, and Magdalena Weniger exploring hyper-normalization, absurdity, performed songs, and melodrama.
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