ACT XV: Open Stage
Featuring Lorenzo Garcia-Andrade Llamas, gervaise alexis savvias and luz
December 7, 2025—Doors at 8pm
Torpedo Theater, Amsterdam
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.
