PREACH MAYHEM
PREACH — A Queer Church Inside CollapsePREACH is an immersive ritual performance that builds a temporary queer church inside collapse.It merges theatre, rave, installation, ceremony, and communal dining inside a transformable curtain labyrinth where audiences become active participants.
Rather than observing, participants move through darkness, offer personal myths, carry soil, engage in consent-based washing rituals, prepare food collectively, and ultimately co-create a feast that transforms into rave.The work explores one urgent question:If collapse is already here, what emerges from it?Structured as a contemporary initiation myth (Descent → Offering → Purification → Feast → Ecstasy)
PREACH treats myth as something that can be rewritten through embodied action. Participants are not spectators but myth-makers whose gestures reshape light, sound, and space.The scenography is built around a modular curtain architecture that continuously reorganizes the environment, allowing fragmentation to shift toward collective expansion.The project thrives in spaces that support immersive experimentation, audience proximity, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.PREACH is not a show about community.It is a rehearsal of community.
Descent → Offering → Purification → Feast → Ecstasy
In January, during a two-week residency at Metropolis, we developed and tested Preach Mayhem through a work-in-progress happening. The space unfolded as a queer festival, part feast, part ritual, part rave, drawing on both Bacchanalian energies and the unruly, carnivalesque spirit of Fastelavn. Here, excess, disguise, and collective release became methods of research.
The audience was invited to move, wander, and inhabit the space from within, a radical act of togetherness. What began as a durational performance transformed into an all-night gathering, where the ritual dissolved into a shared, ecstatic social body.
The ritual did not end by design, but slowly faded as bodies drifted away, leaving traces of sweat, sound, and collective presence behind.
During our residency with Holstebro Dansekompagni, Preach Mayhem unfolded as a hybrid happening, part talkshow, part ritual, part live concert. The work began on screens: fragmented broadcasts of a fictional gathering, echoing Dallas, Talkshow, séance, and oracle, where voices, bodies, and narratives overlapped in a mediated, unstable reality. From this digital surface, the performers operated live, editing, composing, and manipulating video behind curtains. The audience witnessed both the image and its construction, a layered choreography between visibility and concealment.
Realities shifted, as they appeared from the curtains, the work transformed into a queer church ceremony, driven by live concert energy and the purification of the audience through sound, smoke, herbs, and collective dances.
A constant shift of states, realities, and positions unfolded, dissolving boundaries between performer and audience, image and body
