2019 marks the second edition of Balance Club / Culture Festival in Leipzig. Already the festival’s first edition offered club nights and concerts alongside exhibitions[1] and talks. For this year, such an interdisciplinary approach is again one of event’s methods to live up to their vision of being an interface between club culture and society. Sarah Ulrich, who reviewed last year’s festival, managed to clearly capture the idea of this interface: “Club culture became a highly referential and defined social benchmark of a mass and popular culture at large.“ The group behind the festival aspires to live up to this assessment and therefore to act somewhat as a role model. Or to rephrase the idea casually: If club culture really is a benchmark, it should put its head together to come up with new, positive references for mass culture. Under its title “corpo_realities,” the festival focuses its function as an interface this year on aspects of body politics, identities, and related questions of reclamation, visibility, as well as empowerment.
Balance Club / Culture Festival’s program leaves no doubt that at least the basics to achieve this goal is at hand: day one starts with the opening of an installation by artist collective Sexes. The group—amongst its members is Florian Meyer alias Don’t DJ [see zweikommasieben #13]—tries to portrait the relationship between identity and power in its works (at least accordingly to their own description). From the exhibition space, the festival moves to the Institut für Zukunft (IfZ) for a club night, where Juliana Huxtable, LSDXOXO, and others will DJ. Both musicians have been dealing with the questions above for some time now in relation to their music and beyond. The festivals second day starts with a discourse program, where some of the artists and musician who appeared the night before are part of presentations, talks, and discussions (alongside other participants from both the world of music and art, as well as academia). During Balance Club / Culture Festival, this already quite popular and widespread format of talks is complemented by workshops like “Voguing for Beginners” on Friday.
While the festival’s second day is almost exclusively reserved for the discours formats—and rkss’ show is the “only” musical performance in a narrower sense—, Friday and Saturday offer club nights at IfZ again. A highlight should be the pairing of Nkisi [see zweikommasieben #18] and Sentimental Rave on the festival’s final night. Both the London-based producer as well as the Parisian DJ are currently central figures in defining hard dance music that fully focusses on the body. Balance Club / Culture Festival furthermore presents four concerts at UT Connewitz on Saturday. There, the goal seems to be to showcase a versatileness: While Carla Dal Forno [see zweikommasieben #14] and Angel Ho examine two opposite poles of pop music (and especially the South African artist focuses on the festival’s themes), Lanark Artefax and Michela Pelusio find themselves on two branches of experimental music. The former tinkers with a post-rave continuum, while the latter deals with questions of perception in almost installation-like shows.
Paying Balance Club / Culture Festivals a visit is definitely recommended. And we hope that our ticket raffle helps waverers making up their mind—while the ones who already made their decision to go to Leipzig get the chance to save some Euros (or Swiss Francs). All you need to do to win two of the four tickets is to fill in the form below—we’ll inform the lucky ones by the end of next week (May 19, 2019). Further details for the festival are available here: http://balance.ifz.me/
— The ticket raffle has ended —
[1] During such an exhibition, Bogomir Doringer’s project I Dance Alone was also presented and later featured in zweikommasieben #18.