Blick Bassy

In the organizer's words:

With BIKUTSI 3000, Cameroonian artist Blick Bassy creates a multi-media event between dance, music, show, video and decolonial historical narrative.

Beginning with the partition of the African continent by the colonial powers in 1884/85, the piece spans a narrative arc to the year 2050 and celebrates dance as an act of resistance.

Drawing on the tradition of Bikutsi, a traditional Cameroonian music and dance form, he creates an energetic and dense show - a feminist manifesto in which women are the driving force of social and global change. BIKUTSI 3000 is a powerful reflection on one's identity, patriarchal power structures, and productive ways to free oneself from still perpetuating colonial structures.

The Cameroonian musician, writer and director originally staged BIKUTSI 3000 for the Museé Quai Branly in Paris, but his vision goes far beyond that. He wants to create an army of dancers that will carry the Bikutsi into the world. The Humboldt Forum will present both a guest performance version of the piece with dancers from Cameroon (Dec. 7-10) and a new version developed together with Afro-Diasporic dancers from Berlin (Dec. 14-17).

Blick Bassy is one of Cameroon's most innovative artists and was already a guest at the Humboldt Forum in 2021 as part of the DURCHLÜFTEN Festival. Even then, the idea of a collaboration was born. He writes and sings in his native language Bassa and often draws his inspiration from childhood memories, which he processes in his music, dance, lyrics, performances and films. After very successful years with the Cameroonian band Macase, he launched his solo career as a musician in 2019. His album and book 1958 is a tribute to the Cameroonian independence fighter Ruben Um Nyobé, who was shot by French colonial troops that year. In 2016, he wrote his first novel, Le Moabi Cinéma, published by Gallimard and awarded the Grand Prix, which celebrates francophone authors* on the continent. In 2023, he was appointed co-director of the Memory Commission for the reappraisal of the French colonial period in Cameroon.

Participants