Jeremy Nedd & Impilo Mapantsula – HOW A FALLING STAR LIT UP THE PURPLE SKY

Western films serve Jeremy Nedd and the Pantsula artists of Impilo Mapantsula as a speculative starting point for new stories and myths.

After their successful production “the ecstatic”, the nine Pantsula artists of Impilo Mapantsula and Jeremy Nedd are now working together again to explore the «western». The western could be considered a film genre that utilizes some of the most explicit tropes around the hero, the «other» and the vast, empty landscape which they both contentiously inhabit. There is a set of characters and images that have become so deeply engrained in the collective imagination which portray those clichés, but those are certainly not images of pantsulas… How a falling star lit up the purple sky is a dynamic visual poem that proposes a paradigm shift, re-thinks the idea of the archetype and hopefully invites a re-assessment of the psychic and geographical spaces occupied by the western, the (Wild) West, and the South.

In coproduction with Kaserne Basel; Arsenic – Contemporary Performing Arts Center, Lausanne; International Summer Festival Kampnagel; Wiesbaden Biennale; The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg

With the kind support of Fachausschuss Tanz & Theater BS/BL, Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council, SüdKulturFonds, Stanley Thomas Johnson Stiftung, Kulturfonds of the Société Suisse des Auteurs (SSA), GGG Basel, Jacqueline Spengler Stiftung, Scheidegger-Thommen-Stiftung, Schweizerische Interpretenstiftung