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?
What is Hip Hop?
Greg Tate

It was 2002 the rapper Cam’ron appeared in his music video Hey Ma in a pink bandana tied under a pink Baseball Hat, dressed in a velour tracksuit. Otherwise saturated with performative hyper-masculinity, the US Rap World was now soft, furry and pink. This trend quickly reached the catwalks of European metropolises. African-American rappers, who perfectly embodied the racist projections of heterosexuality, hyper-masculinity and aggressiveness, had proven that the formerly feminine gendered color could not harm their image. BEING PINK AIN’T EASY takes this historical moment as it’s starting point. It’s a choreographic investigation making the fragility and power mechanisms visible that underlie social constructions of race and gender. The work is a confrontation with the insatiable white desire for Black forms of expression. 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. In Everything but the Burden – What white People are taking from Black Culture (2003), Greg Tate also describes Hip Hop as the aesthetic by-product of the American dream machine, our culture of consumption, commodification and subliminal seduction. Tate further notes that the figure of White N*, Wigga or Wangsta thus stands in a long tradition with US-American artists of the avantgarde of the 20s and 30s. It’s most precise expression is embodied by the character Eminem. BEING PINK AIN’T EASY refers to skin color as a construction that has set whiteness as it’s most powerful symbol which, by not being named as such, appears as supposedly neutral. The stage character, the White N*, experiences a hyper-marking in the piece: not being able to reject his pink nature, he is confronted with the hard to bear fact of being a profiteer of the white matrix. BEING PINK AIN’T EASY searches for the ambiguities that are interwoven between defensive mechanisms like “white fragility” (Robin DiAngelo) and forms of cultural appropriation.

[Source: play bill]

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