The second in a trilogy of very special performance evenings happening during Creamcake’s 3hd, “Switching Sides” thrives on live-ness. Extreme physical experiences, provocation and confrontation, harsh gestures and intense, perturbing moments are all presented in countless ways by the artists gracing the shop floor of Park Center Treptow on October 9. Once a toy store for children, now an adult playground, the double entendre of the commercial building-come-festival headquarters for 3hd 2021: “Power Play” informs everything under its roof—from Celeste Burlina’s “The prayer of the faithful” scenography, inspired by rodeo rides and wrestling, to the “In Excess” group exhibition nestled inside. Much like a kinky Matryoshka doll, the events and activations will happen in this space-within-a-space (inside a much bigger space), creating its own ecosystem of bold expression and sexually progressive experimentation.

Featured performers and producers for the equally suggestive “Switching Sides” negotiate themes around pain, suffering, and the politics of identity with their actions and movements. Directly engaging with different social realities and testing their bodies’ boundaries, performance duo FlucT’s “Mortal” flips through eternal merge. Monica Mirable and Sigrid Lauren’s collaborations often explore the staging of power, where their interest in understanding these dynamics concerns the perception of suffering, while demanding a place for queer and femme bodies which are most acutely permeated by the patriarchy. Thrilling gestures, contortions and physical expressions coupled with a daring vulnerability becomes the precursor of a new corporeality, communication and care. Producer and artist Dasychira imagines what is not representable through their live sets by building sonic fantasy worlds. They analyze sleep paralysis and the process of pacification, domination in sleep. In doing so they achieve a new awakening and state of consciousness. While creating these stories in songs such as “Orphic Egg”, Dasychira subverts their own subconscious by actively absorbing it. Becoming a part of it to harness its otherworldly essence, then amplifying and transforming it into an act of magic that exists outside of the body with sound, the live set “Between the Gates” explores how far one can stretch their “silver chord” to transmute our deepest fears into pleasure and ecstasy.

Including a DJ set by Auco, “Switching Sides” sets forward questions and concerns around power, while compelling the viewer with the interplay of different, often contrasting energies, whether aggressive, wild and violent, or calm, relaxed and joyful.