Let’s Talk About Ballroom Culture(s) | Litchy Ly Friedrich, Ibrahim Habib & ZOE

This show will take us on a deep dive into the different ballroom communities of Berlin, Marseille and Düsseldorf. Together the hosts talk about local distinctive features, their personal experiences and careers, care work in the community & for sure: dance. 

Litchi Ly Friedrich is an interdisciplinary Artist, whose work is strongly based in performance, research and notions of community. Her work looks at the intersections of dance, academia, community practices and diasporic narratives. She’s an active in the Ballroom community. One of her most recent performance projects is “what Can We Do? What can we say? What We Can Do. What We Can Say.”, dedicated to Jacolby Satterwhite’s exhibition at Deichtorhallen. Her plan for the coming year is to connect more with the Vietnamese Ballroom scene and the diasporic narratives of her own family.

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Ibrahim Habib is born in 1993 in Niamey (Niger). Ibrahim was raised in a binational and inter-racial hole. At the age of 13, his parents decided to move to France in order to seek for a better education for their 6 children. This was a turning point in his life, the cultural and development gap between Niger & France was enormous. Migrating to a new place and start new was hard for the entire family. Upon pursuing his life and education in France, the weight of systemic racism and ignorance weighed more and more on his shoulders. With a master degree in international trade and globalisation obtained at the university of Paris XII in 2017 he decided to look for opportunity abroad and landed in Berlin where he met Ballroom and himself. In 2021, after years of reflection, Ibrahim founded an NGO called the Baobab Project with the ambition to fight against systemic racism & discrimination by supporting POC in every aspect of their life, so they never feel like they don’t matter.

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Marie-Zoe Buchholz aka ZOE is a freelance, interdisciplinary performance artist, project manager and curator from Düsseldorf. In her artistic work she reflects on rehabilitation, transformation and the appropriation of body and space and the relationship between power and marginalization. The inclusion, visibility and empowerment of structurally discriminated people and their stories are the focus of their work. She was introduced to dance and music at an early age and received encouragement and training in various classical and urban performing arts including hip hop, house, jazz dance, contemporary dance as well as jazz and choral singing and classical piano. During her A-levels her contact with stage and dance intensified and between 2007 and 2009 she produced her first own pieces of music and performances within the Düsseldorf ist ARTig format. In 2008 she came into contact with the dance style voguing and later with the ballroom culture, which has had a lasting impact on her art and stage language to this day. ZOE belongs to the first generation of voguing performers in Germany and is considered one of the leading figures for ballroom culture in German-speaking countries. She was a member of the House of Melody (now the House of Saint Laurent), the first German Ballroom House, which established the scene in Germany and was co-founded by ZOE. Since 2012, ZOE has worked on various productions and events. Together with the House of Melody, she initiated workshops, events and festival formats in the Düsseldorf and Berlin area, including Ladies Attack (2014) and BattleRoom (2015/16) at tanzhaus NRW, The Shakespeare Ball (2016) at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and Berlin Voguing Out ( Prince Charles, HAU 2014 - 2016). Following her work in the House of Melody, her first theater residencies and engagements followed in 2017 with the renowned choreographer and director Stephanie Thiersch/MOUVOIR, among others. 2017 - 2019 ZOE performed as a member of the Jitta Collective in Chombotrope, a German-Kenyan production (MOUVOIR) dealing with post-colonialism and the dynamics of cultural appropriation. Chombotrope toured internationally and was awarded the Cologne Dance Prize in 2017. During the same period, ZOE became a protégé of New York jazz and gospel luminary Onita Boone.

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