Jessica Nupen

Welcome to a new state, REPARATION NATION!

Through contemporary and Hip Hop dance, opera, visual arts, live soundscapes, electronic polyrhythmic beats, interactive installation, and a fascinating simultaneity, a dance theater production unfolds that takes the African narrative as its central starting point.

Within a panorama of video landscapes from Senegal, Namibia, South Africa and Germany, sites of memory, rupture, and resilience, an absurdly comic yet deeply resonant constellation around ownership, origin, and identity comes to life.

Which rules guide this new state? Which objects hold the greatest value here: the everyday, the newly created, or the unearthed? Which ghosts linger in the empty vitrines? The ensemble moves through absences left by looted cultural treasures, tracing the centuries-long entanglements of loss, possession, and power from an African perspective. In doing so, they open a spiritual space where the unseen, the silenced, and the forgotten can be acknowledged, and where new bonds of healing and progress can be woven.

“Reparation Nation” is created by and with BiPoC and POAD artists from Senegal, Namibia, Cameroon, South Africa, Ghana, Sri Lanka, and the African diaspora in Hamburg. Together with a trumpet-playing Berlin-based composer and a South African singer from Lübeck, the ensemble conjures a vision of the future that challenges European perceptions of African histories while offering theater itself as a sanctuary of healing, a ritual of remembrance, and a seedbed of transformation.

Press

• “Reparation Nation is not an aggressive indictment, but rather an intelligently compiled reflection on memory and the culture of remembrance, on the past and the future, which playfully creates a lasting ‘aha’ effect.” (tanznetz)