amilton de azevedo writes about Batty Bwoy, by Harald Beharie (Norway/Jamaica), presented in the 2025 Festival TransAmériques (FTA – Tiohtià:ké/Montreal). this text is part of a special coverage; the critic traveled to Canada at the invitation of the FTA.

“Mouth and asshole, two ends of the same tube, when faced as interdict organs, reveal the bodily-political dimension of the construction of reality.” (Can a mestizo asshole speak?, by Jota Mombaça)

“To make the asshole our political instrument, the fundamental directive for another LGBTQ militancy, draw an anal politics really basic: everything in, receive everything, let everything penetrate and send to the outside only shit and farts, this is our eschatological contribution to the system.” (Ética Marica: proclamas libertarias para una militancia LGTBQ, by Paco Vidarte, translated by the author)

When the audience enters the Studio Hydro-Québec in the Monument-National, all lights are on. Harald Beharie is sitting over a sculpture made by Karoline Bakken Lund and Veronica Bruce. The public organizes itself around him, choosing between two isles within the central space or the whole surroundings, sitting on the floor or on a low platform. Both the disposition – considering the height of the sight – and the light design are dispositives towards the fruition of Batty Bwoy.

We can all see each other all of the time; the other’s reaction becomes a part of Beharie’s work. And by being close to the ground and to the performer, our gaze is upon a middle plan and into the vivid reality of their body. As some sort of prologue, Batty Bwoy begins with Beharie interacting with themself, using water, lube and their own saliva. From time to time, they pull the braids away from their face in a somewhat unnaturalistic gesture, almost mechanical, blasé. The initial movement seems to flirt with fetishes and kinkiness; the hand action with the lube, the spitting, the soft finger gagging. Amidst profanity and desire, there is something somewhat ritualistic being prepared.

As Beharie prepares their knee pads, silence still fills the room and it is hard to realize what is to come – this unknowing is a constant throughout Batty Bwoy, as the performer’s crescent is unsettling to a point that it looks like he’ll die if they stop, such is the intensity of the choreography and the vividness of his body. Going through the space in all fours, Beharie’s score revolves around the dutty wine, a Jamaican dance, as the performer told in their FTA interview. Now they’re accompanied by Ring van Möbius retro-prog rock music (through an immersive sound design by Jassem Hindi), and if one looks around one will notice that some of the audience is really vibing into it. Beharie rocking around their hair, their face not to be seen, and a twerking ass faces, closely, the public. An apex is achieved quite soon in Batty Bwoy. And another one will then be built, and another, and another, and another.

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The title of the show, batty bwoy, refers to a Jamaican slang used for queer people – butt boy. This operation of appropriation is central to the score. Beharie is at the same time offering what might be the expectations towards a black queer body and confronting them, resignifying, provoking and, to some extent, inventing themself to that existence. As if at some point there is just no more room for any assumptions around that movement, that body, that life – nevertheless, Batty Bwoy is not about Beharie as an individual.

To some extent, Batty Bwoy offers the audience an epistemological turn, as the performer’s ass – and butthole – becomes the bearer of the ethical and aesthetical discourse of the work for most of the time. It is not a theoretical point being made, and Beharie themself “don’t want to label it as political art”, but as an ass and a butthole are called to the center, it is a provocative way to confront the heterocisnormative world; as Jota Mombaça said on her essay Can a mestizo asshole speak?, “the interdiction of the asshole in bodies suited to the hetero-cis-sexist norm makes it possible to maintain gender as the regulatory ideal attached to heterosexuality as a political regime”.

Beharie withstands pain, pleasure, sacrifice, joy. As the performer stands up and the Ring van Möbius music builds up, there is some sort of triumph being witnessed, a triumph of a body that had been pushed to its limit, literally and metaphorically speaking. It is about absorbing it all: the slang, the expectations, the violence, death, life, desire. Looking profoundly through the eyes of the public, gazing with lust, Beharie walks around; a teaser, still provocative even now that the face is there to see and to be seen.

Then, they jump up and down on the sculpture, moving it around, making some audience members worried that it won’t support that action. As Beharie goes, once again, from repetition to exhaustion, some people also give up on supporting that action and leave the theatre. One could say that, at that point, the statement had already been made; but it might be precisely about it: forcing boundaries towards its limits and provoking those that thought they had it figured out. Absorb it all. Batty Bwoy may also be about the resilience and the resistance of the materials. Of the flesh, of the metal, of the soul.