Joana Tischkau / Jeremy Nedd / Sophie Yukiko / Malpaso Dance Company

Hardly any artist exposes dominant modes of thinking with as much precision and wit as Joana Tischkau. The choreographer and director received the Tabori Prize in 2024 and most recently appeared at the Summer Festival in 2022. Together with choreographers Jeremy Nedd, himself a frequent guest of the festival, and Sophie Yukiko, Tischkau now creates a full-length dance work for the Cuban Malpaso Dance Company, exploring authenticity and exoticization. Since its founding in 2012, the company has toured internationally with an impressive repertoire ranging from Martha Graham and Malpaso co-founders Osnel Delgado and Daile Carrazana to Aszure Barton and Mats Ek; and last appeared at the Summer Festival opening in 2018. Drawing on the iconic Tropicana revue theater, founded in Havana in the 1930s, Tischkau, Nedd and Yukiko expose how tourism and cultural exploitation can become a trap. With pointed satire they interrogate Eurocentric perspectives and draw on trap music, a hip-hop subgenre that emerged in the 1990s in Black communities in Atlanta and shifts between racist stereotypes and lived realities. Blending choreography for the Malpaso dancers with references to revue traditions and a deliberate exaggeration of clichés, TRAPICANA is a highly dynamic stage work that plays with expectations while deftly subverting them.