Performnace

Bedside Manner is a horizontal performance ritual unfolding inside Charité — part lullaby, part exorcism, part collective release. Borrowing its title from the clinical language of care, the work asks what happens when exhaustion becomes inheritance and when rest itself turns into a radical act.

Moving through choreographies of reclining, listening, touch, and surrender, performers and audience enter a temporary recovery ward for the spiritually overworked. Bedside rhythms blur with blues, whispered prayer, guided sleep, frontline testimony, and sonic seduction. Bodies lie down not in defeat, but in refusal: refusing productivity, vigilance, composure, and the lifelong discipline of remaining upright.

Bedside Manner treats horizontality as both ceremony and counterspell — a way of releasing what the body has been forced to carry. Somewhere between vigil, catharsis, and haunted choir rehearsal, the performance becomes a rite for the sleepless, the examined, the caregiving, the burnt out, and the historically unrested.

Here, the bed is not only a site of illness or intimacy, but a stage for forgiveness.

Shadow Fannie Sosa is an internationally applauded, award-winning, interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and activist. Their Afro-diasporic and Indigenous ancestry has informed their many years of research, performances, and teachings. Sosa’s work focuses on developing pleasurable methodologies using vibrational and sonic therapy, movement practices that liberate the core, and transformational social justice-centered publications.

Texts by Fannie Sosa include A White Institutions Guide For Welcoming Artists Of Color And Their Audiences, Pleasurable MOONStruation, The Origins Of Patriarchy and Bio-Hack is Black. Their performance work has been produced by Tate Modern, Matadero Madrid, and Wiener Festwochen. Through their social justice work, Sosa has provided professional development trainings and consultancy for Performance Space New York, Mousonturm and Tate Modern.

Navild Acosta is a Creative Capital Artist, Disability Futures Fellow and an internationally acclaimed artist and activist based in Berlin. Being transgender, queer and black-dominican has inspired his community based work. Navild’s written work is featured in Performance Journal, VICE, Brooklyn Magazine, Apogee Journal, BOMB Magazine. Navild’s performance works have debuted at Matadero Madrid, Tate Modern, Tanz im August and Kunst-Werke Institut, Wiener Festwochen, The David Roberts Art Foundation, The Kimmel Center, MOMA PS1, Studio Museum, New Museum. Navild has collaborated with Alicia Keys, Fannie Sosa, BEARCAT, Lyle Ashton-Harris & Ralph Lemon.

Yocheved Zenaida-Cohen is performing under the stage name Obliviana and is primarily a musician and writer. She is originally from Florida and now lives primarily in Brooklyn, New York.