An undersung legend of queer performance in Germany, Joaquín La Habana traces, in a conversation with dance historian Eike Wittrock, the various ancestral lines that shape his spiritual and performative practice – Yoruba, Afro-Cuban, Afro-American, and modern dance, Cuban Carnival, Tropicana, drag, and queer culture. This conversation, punctuated with live music and archival documents, portrays the many facets of La Habana’s art, which was queer and intersectional before many of these theories became known to broader publics. A Cuban Santería priest, La Habana trained in dance and singing, moving to New York in the 1970s and to West Berlin in 1981. Promoting Cuban culture in both West and East Germany, he worked with Cabaret Chez Nous, appeared in Rosa von Praunheim films, and was heavily involved in Karneval der Kulturen in the 1990s. La Habana was there, before many, defying the presumably hard borders of high and low culture and the binaries of gender and sexuality, cannibalizing exoticism while affirming cultural difference.

As part of into the unfathomable pearl (tungo sa di-abot-diling perlas)

Further events:

Fri., 23.6.2023 21:00
VOID
Joshua Serafin
Performance

Fri., 23.6.2023 22:00
Ladyboys United
Short film programme, with a conversation with Ragil Huda (in English)