Cherish Menzo

Cherish Menzo is from Brussels and Amsterdam, and she is one of the artistic directors of the GRIP dance organization with Femke Gyselinck, Jan Martens and Steven Michel. Menzo performed as a dancer in pieces by Lisbeth Gruwez, Jan Martens, Nicole Beutler, Eszter Salamon, Benjamin  Kahn and Akram Khan, among others. Her powerful physical language is fully expressed in her choreographic pieces, which tour internationally. She looks for new modes of being and moving which place beauty and the grotesque on an equal footing; she investigates new ways to use distance to bring herself and spectators away from what is known and familiar and what is too easily considered as “the only reality”. She is inspired  by industrial hip-hop and the nostalgia for 1990’s and 2000’s hip-hop, as well as rap lyrics and manga or speculative fiction. In 2019, she created the piece Jezebel and in 2022 DARKMATTER, deux pièces which was programmed in the Flanders Theaterfestival and its Dutch equivalent.