GIVE ME HELL Accidental Dante


Ami Kohara as Cleopatra Francesca Lacatena as Thais Maija Timonen as harpy Nathalie Wuerth as Medusa Megan Francis Sullivan as Beatrice Dörte Manzke as Virgil Ana-Maria Hadji-Culea as Accidental Dante

The retraining program aimed at making artists more useful to society has failed. They are now being sent straight to Inferno. Having misinterpreted it as a residency one of the artists has rewritten the ending of Dante's original text as a project. The now popular song is making a mockery of Dante and the old order. Fearing an uprising, Beatrice - the chief muse - sends Virgil to the outer world to seek help from the artist's friend, who is given the task to find her and bring her back. This Accidental Dante will have to ask the female characters in Dante´s Inferno for directions. Cast as humiliating representations, despite having occupied significant power in real life, these characters rely on stand-up to deal with their situation. How will Accidental Dante deal with the thin threads holding together this poetic construction?

GIVE ME HELL is a performance series by Ana-Maria Hadji-Culea wherein commissioned and partly improvised parts meet scripted material. Its first chapter premiered in 2016 in Berlin with the following predicament:

As part of a new cultural self-reinvention project set in a near future, nine artists have been rounded up to be retrained into the more serviceable civic activity of performing stand up entertainment. This will be their first public appearance. Art is no longer administered by middlemen, but governed directly by the top political figurehead. Each performer will compete against each other, with Angela Merkel as the absolute juror. This is still unknown to the performers.

A double of Angela Merkel elected the winner, who was crowned and awarded a descent into hell. This is where the misunderstanding and the second chapter begins.

with support from Kulturkontakt Nord and Index

När: 20 juni 2018 19:00 - 20 juni 2018 21:00

Var: Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation Kungsbro Strand 19 / Stockholm

Arrangör: Ana-Maria Hadji-Culea

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