On December 6th and 7th playbill will present its first double-bill weekend, beginning with an act dedicated to poet, educator and photographer S*an D. Henry-Smith. Within their practice, Henry-Smith explores Black/queer diasporic practices rooted in experimentalism, improvisation and transdisciplinarity, often working collaboratively across outputs spanning sound, performance and publishing.

In continuing with this year’s focus of ‘song’, Henry-Smith draws on a background of expanded poetry readings and performances engaging and supported by music—having performed similar compositions under their own name and with the solo project sunchoke, and as a bandmate in outfits including twill, PhantomSun, Depth Address and Black Boots—to present their forthcoming poetry collection PACES THE CAGE (The Song Cave, New York). Lifting off from their previous book Wild Peach, published with Futurepoem in 2020, Henry-Smith’s latest collection expands an already-queered language to near breaking point, taking up an ongoing consideration of the permeable lines between poetry, performance and their relative stakes in language, in process amplifying an ever-multiplying voice—belated, and yet to arrive. Through the complexities of personal experiences and the use of a poetically fragmented voice, the literal and metaphorical are here remixed in real time. While PACES THE CAGE is Henry-Smith’s second book of poetry, it is the first time they will present a book from start to finish as a live performance. Given that PACES THE CAGE is also set to be published in literally a matter of days, ACT XIV stands in as an unofficial book launch of sorts, in Henry-Smith’s new home town, no less.

Unfolding primarily as a vocal performance—in which reading, singing and humming will take centrestage—it will be accompanied by some sonic interventions—such as looping, guitar and mic’d percussion—and the recording of a film yet-to-be-made. In experimenting with the live format, the performance and its rehearsal will be documented via video shot in the style of the concert-film. Zooming in on the unanticipated flutter of a hand and other performance affectations often otherwise ignored, the film will focus attentively on Henry-Smith’s movements, resulting in both the documentation of a live act and a portrait of gesture. To shoot the film Henry-Smith will collaborate with Silvia Ulloa, Playbill’s in-house documentor, and artist and collaborator Dustin James.

While preparing their act, Henry-Smith has also been working with Playbill on the selection of artists for our third Open Stage act, a dialogue through which we have had the pleasure of witnessing their commitment to collaboration, peer-to-peer exchange and education first-hand. This act will take place the following night, giving audiences the chance to celebrate their practice across a whole weekend—and to toast the first public outing of the achievement that is PACES THE CAGE.

ACT XV marks our third open call as a platform and the second night of Playbill’s first double bill weekend. Now a staple of our program, the annual Open Stage act started in 2023 as a way to share the theatre with a group of young practitioners equally committed to exploring language and text through artistic works. In this spirit and with much excitement, we again hand the platform over to artists, musicians and writers working with similar concerns, aware that taking the stage often requires resources not always available.

In a further gesture of opening up, we also work with an external selector each year, to make sure we try and get outside our own curatorial biases and habits, and to introduce the work of the applicants to a leading practitioner in the field. This year, we worked with poet, photographer and ACT XIV artist S*an D. Henry-Smith to select three applicants through an open call, for which artists were invited to propose a work that they felt would be at home on the stage at Torpedo Theater and which engaged with our year-long focus of ‘song’ in whatever varying and experimental ways they deemed fit. Over the years of doing the open call, we have always found there to be shared concerns and approaches forming between applicants, offering up a kind of miniature overview of developments in text-based art each time. And this year was no exception: we found many crossovers throughout, from ruminations on grief and memory, socio-historical inscriptions unfolding through biographical investigation and a reoccurring investment in being technically modest—something we try to stay true to as a platform as well.

With this in mind, the three selected artists and collectives—Lorenzo Garcia-Andrade Llamas, gervaise alexis savvias and luz—present an array of approaches to voicing and song. Throughout the evening, a chance encounter with a grandmother’s manuscripts will see ghostly echoes and spirits conjured in search of meaning, an experimental opera based on a classic of queer literature will put musicality and text at the forefront, and narratives and imaginaries surrounding the triumph of the Cuban Revolution will be brought to life through sampling, distortion and layered voices. While a diverse cast of figures, periods and approaches will make up the evening, what the works have in common is a relationship to doing history otherwise—to doing it in and out of time, between tongues and with fragmentation in mind. Join us and this choir of characters to celebrate the final act of 2025.

playbill is very excited to welcome you to its new permanent home at Sint Jansstraat, an office that is also an archive that will be, on two occasions throughout the year, a presentation space as well. To celebrate, and to inaugurate a new facet of our activities called SETTINGS, we’re welcoming Moniek Toebosch back to the ‘stage’.

With this in mind, SETTING I: Moniek Toebosch elaborates on ACT II, when we first presented the work of Toebosch back in 2022. In this act, through a restaging of her work Kop op Kop [Head to Head] (1994), Toebosch’s self-reflection via serial portraiture was set alongside a form of feminist institutional critique, which questioned the presence of female subjectivities within the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam at the time—most often rendered by male painters rather than female artists, and kept from view in the museum’s storage depots. Here, in SETTING I, the personal rubs up against the institutional once more, this time through the presentation of two films made by Toebosch in 2000.

First produced for her retrospective at Marres, House for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht, De Wereld Verklaard [The World Explained] is a video composed of six segments. In them, Toebosch both catalogues and describes six of her past works. It’s a full-length portrait (of a practice), wherein tight and plain, behind a table, she summons her previous works through language, performing via the use of word and gesture, in turn reconfiguring expectations around what a retrospective can be. In the second video, Welkom, gaat u zitten [Welcome, take a seat], Toebosch invites the audience in and encourages them to make themselves comfortable before going on to give a speech— a medium repeated throughout her practice as well as during her time as a radio broadcaster and director of DasArts—about her desire to transform the museum into a welcoming home.

In engaging with the format of a retrospective (and playing with it just as Toebosch did), SETTING I: Moniek Toebosch aims to push at the limits of what exhibition making can be—two films in a semi-renovated space—in turn ensuring we recommit to a promise we set ourselves as a platform when we began, especially given the ‘growth’ that comes with taking on our own space: that being, to stay true to the small-scale. Correspondingly, Toebosch’s presentation at playbill activates connections between historical and future displays of her work, as SETTING I: Moniek Toebosch precedes a large-scale survey exhibition, which is currently being developed by LI-MA, Stedelijk Museum Breda and Rozenstraat – a rose is a rose is a rose, to be launched in 2026. Through Toebosch’s own ‘welcome speech’—and a selection of furniture and household items kindly loaned from Rozenstraat on behalf of the three institutions hosting the survey—we in turn welcome you to this new chapter, where we hope to imbue the hospitality and warmth of Torpedo Theater into Sint Jansstraat 35 as well.