BLISS XXL (Day 2)

Enter the daring and groundbreaking world of BLISS, where experimental performance takes centre stage. Twice a year, this platform brings together artists who are shaping the dance and theatre landscape of tomorrow - daring, adventurous and always unexpected. BLISS invites you to embrace the excitement of the unknown. During this XXL edition, BLISS now also palms the Red hall with music and performances.

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Sat Oct 4 2025

18:00 – Edith Saldanha – SKIN.BODIES I

20:00 – Lucy Railton / Charlie Hope / Rebecca Salvadori – Not a Word From Me

21:30 – Federico Vladimir / Pablo Lilienfeld – Monica

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Edith Saldanha / SKIN.BODIES I

What traces do mechanisms of power leave onto our skin?

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SKIN.BODIES I is a visually striking video work in which artist Edith Saldanha explores how the body becomes a site where oppression and resistance meet. The focus lies on the skin and its materiality as a threshold for individual and collective memory.

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Through image and sound, the work follows how bodies move through social and economic inequalities, and how they are reshaped by the violence these systems produce. Skin, as a surface, becomes a political space. A living archive of the forces that attempt to define, constrain, or erase the body. Bodies are caught between two false promises: the imperative to conform to dominant norms, and the instrumentalization of difference as a form of value.

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Rather than proposing transformation within existing structures, SKIN.BODIES I invites us to reimagine the body beyond the frameworks that produce violence themselves.

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SKIN.BODIES I marks the beginning of a triptych that centers the relationship between systemic violence and the body.

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Lucy Railton / Charlie Hope / Rebecca Salvadori

Not A Word From Me

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A sensory experience in which sound, sculptural light and film intertwine

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The new live performance Not A Word From Me by cellist and electronic composer Lucy Railton, created in collaboration with video artist Rebecca Salvadori and light designer Charlie Hope, builds on over a decade of creative exchange and friendship between the three artists. 

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Drawing from Railton’s latest body of work, Not A Word From Me creates a permeating environment where sound, gesture, image, and light respond to each other, directed by an ever-evolving sensual gravitas. 

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Railton’s use of cello, electronics, and amplified objects catalyses a multidirectional soundscape through minimal yet magnetic gestures, expanding the spatial focus and material tension of her practice into “a loud whisper.” 

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Each moment arises through synchronicity with Salvadori’s live projections - blending her signature behind-the-scenes footage with monochromatic abstraction - and Hope’s sculptural lighting, oscillating between grandeur, pulse, and quiet focus to subtly shift the audience’s sense of participation and proximity.

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Resisting polish in favour of intimacy & friction, it builds an anti-show of sorts: a space stripped of theatrical convention, where meaning arises through possibility, and presence is felt as much in what is withheld as in what is revealed. 

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Not A Word From Me was developed at ICA London and premiered at CTM Festival in Berlin in 2025.

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Federico Vladimir / Pablo Lilienfeld Monica

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Dance, video and music rewrite the mother story in a moving telenovela of memory

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The Spanish musician and choreographer Pablo Lilienfeld and the Argentinian artist Federico Vladimir work together as a couple, meaning that their work and relationship are intensively intertwined. For their first visit to DE SINGEL, they dive into the family history of their mothers, who coincidentally are both called Monica. Their performance - a visual and musical telenovela - is a spectacular reconstruction of their shared family tree.

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The two Monicas, daughters of war refugees, grew up in Argentina and later moved to Spain. One was an ecofeminist painter, the other a muse and nude model. Their visual legacy serves as the basis for Monica, a hybrid dance performance about war, migration and motherhood. With a mix of video, music and dance, Lilienfeld and Vladimir rewrite their story and challenge the traditional ideas of motherhood.