Heroes

In August 1988, a young superhero of New York’s art world died. Now, exactly 30 years later, RambaZamba is bringing the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat back on stage. A celebration of heroes. But what happens when heroes are outcasts and do not match the social standards? On the one hand Basquiat was an American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent who lived in a world of every day racism, while on the other hand he was strongly celebrated in New York’s high society art world, together with artists such as Andy Warhol, Madonna, Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, and Vincent Gallo. With the support of influential galleries, he soon became an internationally acclaimed star. Basquiat sucked life up and, in the shape of his artworks, he spat it right back out.

A choreography by Sara Lu and Ruben Nsue will be combined with text fragments of American literature to create a theatrical collage, directed by Jacob Höhne, in which the colors of a dazzling life of pop art and of neo-expressionism and the more muted colors of self-estrangement, longing for death, racism, drugs and darkness are mixed together through the sounds of Hip Hop and Jazz. Intoxication is the path to a different kind of perception. In the case of Basquiat, it is both a hypersensitive and an exuberant perception through which he sees the world. What is it like, having to digest everything at the same time because everything seems to be taking place all at once? What kinds of nightmares or demons can this perception uncover? Basquiat’s obsession is our starting point, it is the sense through which we want to discover the world. How do the contradictions of Basquiat’s life reflect upon our actors? What do the differences between success and glamour on the one hand, and on the other the everyday reality of discrimination and exclusion, mean to us today? “We can be heroes just for one day.”