EGO – Journey of Urban Art

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Schauspielhaus and future Pina Bausch Centre, Bundesallee 260, Wuppertal

A production of the Urban Art Complex in partnership with TANZRAUSCHEN and LaOnda e.V.

All styles of urban art dance as we know them today can be traced back to the black subculture in New York 50 years ago. Today, the date of birth is considered to be 11 August 1973, when Kool DJ Herc organised a block party in the recreation room of a social housing complex on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York. Today, urban art is a worldwide intercultural movement and art movement.

This year, breakdancing will be a competition at the Summer Olympics in Paris for the first time. But it has been a long road to get there. It took individual passion, commitment, a lot of enthusiasm and resistance to discrediting and a lack of support to make the various forms and styles of urban art, which came "from the street" (street art), acceptable. From rap and raves to murals, ballroom, hip hop, krump, hypedance, popping, tutting, locking, waving, gliding, sliding, skipwalking, jerking, stomping, house, dancehall, jacking, lofting, footwork, shuffle, whaacking, voguing, tecktonic, jumpstyle, whining and much more, street & club styles are conquering the mainstream.

Ben Wichert's Urban Art Complex in the Hofaue is practically a neighbor of the Pina Bausch Centre under construction. We are therefore very pleased about this first cooperation. In the dynamic piece of dance theatre that a group of 13 children and young people under the direction of Ben Wichert, Wuppertal and Miracle Laackman, Aachen are currently staging together, it will be precisely about the development: 1. the soul of hip-hop, 2. struggle and hustle, 3. cypher and party. It's about the individual struggle, the significance for the individual, for society, for art, the formative life style and commercialisation, but also the soul and the feeling for urban arts, for the community that still supports art today.

Developments from the beatmaker contests initiated by the Urban Art Complex in Wuppertal will be used for the music. In other words, a lot of young energy and creativity. We are looking forward to the premiere with you.

Let’s dance!

The duo of the artistic direction:

Miracle Laackmann is an internationally sought-after dancer/choreographer, trained audio engineer and co-founder of the Free Spirit Festival. In 2021, he founded an association with other artists to promote art and culture and has been the artistic director ever since. He was initially taught in the discipline of HipHop/Freestyle by pioneers from Germany and from then on continued to train regularly through various workshops worldwide. Now he gives national and international workshops and is a guest judge at many events or performs his shows.

He has already performed in countries such as Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, India, Morocco, Ukraine, Greece, Sweden, Poland, France, Belarus, Romania, Ghana and many more. He has performed for organisations such as the Charlemagne Prize Awards, the Chio, Mercedes-Benz and many more.

Miracle has also won numerous championships in his career to date. These include Juste Debout London, FS Championship, Urban champs, Kulture of Hype and Hope Gold edition Rotterdam etc. Last year he choreographed the pieces Urban Afro and 11 out of 10.

Ben Wichert is one of the world's best-known dancers/choreographers in the HipHop Freestyle dance scene. He is the first German dance world champion in the HipHop Freestyle category (Paris 2012) and the first German judge of the HipHop Freestyle World Championship Juste Debout (2017) and won several German championships. He was also a finalist in the German TV show Got to Dance for Wuppertal.

Wichert collaborates with artists such as Martin Grubinger and rapper Redman. He is also the founder and managing director of the multimedia dance centre Urban Art Complex in Wuppertal. In addition to his career as a dancer, he works as Creative Director at the Hip Hop Academy in the Kulturpalast Hamburg with Tim Dollmann (founder of the music label Eimsbush). He also teaches workshops and acts as a judge at events and competitions.

Wichert made it to German cinemas for the first time with the feature film Fly. Fly is a drama from 2021 directed by Katja von Garnier and starring Svenja Jung, Jasmin Tabatabai, Nicolette Krebitz, Katja Riemann and Farba Dieng. The film was supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the FFF Bayern, the FFA and the DFFF.

The project is funded by ChanceTanz, a project of the Bundesverband Tanz in Schulen e. V. as part of the programme Kultur macht stark, Bündnisse für Bildung.