Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx – Bloody Grace!
Residency week 23 & 24 / 2026
Bloody Grace! combines choreography and text to critically revisit the Annunciation, the biblical scene in which the archangel Gabriel Announces to Mary her virgin pregnancy and chosen role as the mother of God/Jesus. Framed around Mary as a virgin and obedient vessel for God’s will, the Annunciation can legitimize patriarchal control over bodies and lives while repressing sexuality. I propose a rewriting that transforms this motif long mobilized in support of religious and political conservatism into a lever for emancipation.
«Annunciation iconography caught my fascination after I had an abortion. The figures within it unexpectedly echoed my experience: a pregnant person experiencing an irreversible moment, a helper, and a spirit seeking embodiment. In search of meaning, I found details in narrative and iconographic representations—lines of flight that allow us to see the biblical story as a surprising mirror of contemporary experience: Mary becomes pregnant alone, her explicit “yes” invites reflection on consent, and Gabriel often appears as an ambiguously gendered figure.
A four-part dramaturgy—Mary, Gabriel, Spirit, and Lily—decentres Mary to foreground a plurality of voices and readings. Drawing on pagan myths that may have shaped the story, I re-imagine the Annunciation in a way that restores sensual and erotic dimensions while challenging gender essentialism and reproductive norms. At the same time, I delve into my own body and senses to approach the scene as a critical moment in which time stretches and something irrevocable happens.»
– Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx
Credits and partners
Concept, text & performance: Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx
Choreographic advice: Maria Ferreira Silva
Light research: Evelien Cammaert
Sound design: Anne Lepère
Dramaturgy: Elke Van Campenhout
Dramaturgical vistis: Carolina Mendonça
Partners: BUDA (Kortrijk), GC De Rinck, GC De Markten, Kunstenwerkplaats, La Raffinerie-Charleroi Danse, Metarage (Brussels), STUK (Leuven), VIERNULVIER (Ghent), KAAP (Bruges), DansiT (Trondheim).
About the artist
Alice is a performance maker, dramaturg, and certified somatic practitioner, holding graduate degrees in literary and performance studies from KU Leuven and Utrecht University. Since 2018, she develops choreographic performances and research projects that centers slow choreography to reclaim our bodies and attention from the pressures of late capitalism.
Her site-specific performances, Creatures at rest (2021) and Slow Visit (2024) invite performers and visitors to attune to layers of reality that usually escape us: a libidnal, molecular realm of microperceptions as well as an awareness of wider timespans. At the invitation of the Amsterdam-based curatorial platform Slow Research Lab, she contributed to the publication Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection with the chapter “Space as Atmosphere: Floating in a Molecular Bath” (Ed. Carolyn F. Strauss, Valiz, Amsterdam, 2021).