Small Miracle #1: Nightkeeping - #GetInvolved
Small Miracle #1: Nightkeeping - #GetInvolved
Genre: Expo | Food | Performance | Talks | MusicLineup: Kaixin Chen, Kunstenserven, Lucas Lagomarsino, Third Gut (Alec Mateo & Raoni/Muzho Saleh), Carla Arcos, Margriet de Jong, Sankrit Kulmanochawong Time: 17:00 - 22:00 hrsTickets: € 10,- Regulier: €10,- | Student/CJP/<26: €8,- | Stadspas Groene Stip: €2,50Tickets#GetInvolved
This series is part of the Plein Theater program for co-creation, in which we invite you to participate. Read more on our page Community >
We invite you to an evening dedicated to exploring nocturnality beyond the leisure stages of nightlife, focusing instead on stars, dreams, labors, furtiveness, vigils, hibernation, lullabies, fugitivity, and opacity.
Small Miracles
Small Miracles is a series of interdisciplinary programs that tend to the existing and possible communities of Plein Theater. Taking place across different Saturdays throughout the year, the series brings together diverse artistic practices in extended, durational formats.
Each Saturday is dedicated to a word—or a word-mode—serving as an invitation to explore, through gathering and celebration, in a theater, what a word can make happen in the here and now. With a focus on desirable abundances and communal luxury, the programming of Small Miracles leans toward words aligned with these notions.
The first Small Miracle will take place in the depth of winter, on February 21st, and will be dedicated to Nightkeeping. A varied evening full of live harp soundscapes, lullabies, readings,talks and inspiration how to capture the night. Throughout the evening, a new exhibition will be open, alongside readings, performances, and food and sonic offerings.
#1: Nightkeeping
Nightkeeping is a practice of staying. Not staying awake in order to produce, but staying in attention with the nocturnal. This evening is dedicated to exploring nocturnality beyond the leisure stages of nightlife, focusing instead on stars, dreams, labors, furtiveness, vigils, hibernation, lullabies, fugitivity, and opacity.
This first program unfolds as a soft, exploratory gesture at Plein Theater, transforming the theater space into one where the stage is shared by performers and audiences alike.
The program will start at 17:00 with the opening of an exhibition by Kaixin Chen, in which she will present her research on the historical relationship between spices and the Oost neighborhood of Amsterdam up to the present day. At 20:00, we will move into the theater, where Kaixin, alongside Sankrit, will offer a food gesture that combines this research with her ongoing work on temple food.
Third Gut’s second public performance will focus on lullabies from their stance of sonic fugitivity and the practice of wailing and moaning. Margriet de Jong will give a reading written for the occasion of the lapse of time through her. Kunstenserven expands the imaginaries of the harp by generating oneiric soundscapes that blend with the performer. Lucas Lagomarsino, with the piece Fantasy Gone, will engage with stars and open the night outward. Carla Arcos is thinking of ways in which to take the night with us back home.
About the artists
Kaixin Chen (b. Guangdong, CN), an Amsterdam-based artist and publisher focused on experimental publishing, not through books, but by organising short gatherings around the dining table. Drawing from East Asian literature and philosophies of nature, Chen uses food, audiovisual, minimal prints to explore the theme of ineffable emotional experiences.
Carla Arcos is a cultural worker based in Rotterdam. She wears multiple hats as a graphic designer, artist, organizer, and gardener. Her practice centers on facilitating spaces for pedagogy, experimenting with forms of publishing, and exploring gardening as a methodology. Much of her work is and has been devoted to SPIN, a collective of friends, artists, and organizers engaged in community building, organizing, and the exploration of different forms of study.
Third Gut is an experimental sonic performance project between Raoni/Muzho Saleh and Alec Mateo, who, in their noisy bemoaned togetherness form a psycho-somatic space for undergoing the alchemical. A sonic tissue that lures the collective into the muddy waters of discomfort, where becoming disturbed reveals a desired futurity. It is through the generative force of noise as sound, that Third Gut aims to undo the brutality which masks as enlightened civility.
Lucas Lagomarsino was born in Buenos Aires in July 1993, and graduated from SNDO – School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam and currently part of the MA in Art and Performance Research at the University of Amsterdam, while independently conceptualising and developing artistic work in dance and performance. His works were presented primarily in Amsterdam and Barcelona, as part of the Metropolitan Dance Festival and the Grec Festival.His practices digs into re orientations as a queer culture work, latinoamerican romanticism, dance archive to respond to dance practices, questions about transmission in composition and telepathy on creation as symbolic world, using sometimes silly choreographies to unfold performative notions.
Kunstenserven (Moritz Friedhofen) is a classically trained harpist playing with common and traditional perceptions of the harp. While moving between genres, they are utilizing contemporary styles to explore how the harp can be utilized in different ways and settings leading to new sounds and possibilities. Their performances aim at subverting expectations and creating heartfelt experiences of connection.
Margriet de Jong, 11 January 1961. Born in the oldest city in the Netherlands, raised in an old Hanseatic and garrison town, became an adult in Berlin, was lost in the polder for 23 years, and for the past 16 years devoted to Amsterdam – East. Age 7, she urged the other pupils in 2 nd grade to join her invented spontaneous dance group. They performed in tutu’s made of her mother’s old net curtains to Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik”. An artist by heart, if not by profession, in the years that followed she wrote poetry, acted in plays and musicals. She performed in stand-up comedy, played the guitar and performed in orchestra’s and bands with the violin. She drew portraits and painted landscapes until at the age of 49 she was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. It took some years to digest that message and then she took a big turn. At age 55, she became a dancer again. She was very lucky 9 years later to be invited to produce a solo dance film. She thought of a story to tell, made a script, drew a story board and danced and directed her life away in a short poetry-dance film entitled Who is this being?(2025).
Sankrit Kulmanochawong is an interdisciplinary artist and designer from Bangkok, currently based in Amsterdam. He is drawn to stories and collective memory as lenses through which to examine memory and diaspora, tracing how the movement of people, materials and objects shape our understanding of identity and belonging.
