Pink people wanna know if other pink people like hip-hop
how can it still be hip-hop?
That’s like asking, if Black people like
Dirty Harry
is he still Clint Eastwood?
(Greg Tate)

Gangstas, Pimps und Hoes: The US rap world is imbued with images of exaggerated masculinity. When Black artists such as Cam'ron and Kanye West launched a fashion trend of pink plush, fur and velour in the early 2000s, they proved that even Barbie’s favorite color could not damage their image of heterosexual hypermasculinity. Joana Tischkau draws on this occasion to reveal the fragility of social constructions such as race and gender: to what extent are bodies of the "other" used to consolidate the structural power of white Cis masculinity?

BEING PINK AIN’T EASY is a confrontation with the insatiable white desire for Black forms of expression, searching for the ambiguities that are interwoven between defensive mechanisms like white fragility (Robin DiAngelo) and forms of cultural appropriation. In addition to their music, artists provide us with their physicalities as usable concepts for the construction of one‘s own identity. The capitalist logic of consumption turns Black aesthetics into a performative mask available to everyone.

BIO

Joana Tischkau dances. Her first dancing memory goes back to Kaoma’s 1989 Hit Lambada which she moved to at a children's birthday party. Later she studied contemporary dance and theatre at Coventry University in the UK and choreography and performance at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany. Her artistic practice is a hybrid mash-up where the writings of bell hooks meet beatboxing, whiteness is turned into a work-out, and where Roberto Blanco is hailed as an Afro-German hero, subversively distorting socio-cultural practices, codes and meanings inscribed onto bodies of color within the context of pop culture, Western art and dance history. Joana works independently as a choreographer, dancer, community dance artist and in teaching. One of her recent productions, PLAYBLACK is a copy of the 1990 Kids Television program Mini Playback Show and was invited to the Tanzplattform Deutschland as much as Impulse Festival in 2020.

joanadances.tumblr.com