BREAK ALIVE brings together the results of a three-year dialogue between breakdancer Bboy Khaire and visual artist NEUEREALITAET.
The artists discuss the possibilities and limitations of creativity in the midst of our current socio-cultural, political and economic network.
This network organises, shapes, categorises and structures our being alive. Creativity uses this order, the existing forms, categories and structures, builds on them, and breaks them, dissolving old categories and creating new ones.
BREAK ALIVE explores this process as a rhythmic relation between silence, standstill, and structure on the one hand – the paintings – and movement, expression, creative formations on the other – the breakdance. Breakdance represents the creative force and movement, the undoing of existing categories and the creation of new forms of expression, while the paintings represent silence, standstill, form and structure. The performance is accompanied by the following recitative spoken by Alice Bischof:
How long does it take
to break
a life?
How wrong can it be
to be
alive?
An innocent flower growing high
attracting butterflies
from the sky...
Let us talk to this boy.
Your dreams are high –
so high you'd die
if ever you would reach the sky.
You break alive,
but life breaks you
before you die.
Moments of freedom:
They exist.
But if you want more, you must
exit.
The rules of the game
are structure
and blame for those who try
and break
alive.
Breaking the rules
won't keep you alive.
Breaking alive can't undo the rules.
Breaking your life –
is all you can do.
Throwing the joker, the golden thread –
blowing the show up til I get mad!
Trying to bend
the rules of the game;
distorting the structure
just for your fame?
This is not how it works.
I have threaded this frame
to make a new game
and all that is free
shall be captured
by me.
About the Artists
Bboy Khaire is a breakdancer from Casablanca, Morocco, living in Berlin. As a member of the internationally successful breakdance group LHIBA KINGZOO, he performed at various festivals and battles in Africa and Europe. His dance style is characterised by precise footwork and innovative musicality.
NEUEREALITAET is a painter living in Berlin. In her works, she materialises the immaterial, invisible, inaudible and translates it into our shared physical reality. The result is what she calls "new reality": A reality in which material and immaterial things exist at the same level – the painting.




Trailer from the première on June 2024 at the art festival 48h Neukölln in Berlin, Germany. Breakdance: BBoy Khaire, Paintings and recitative: Alice Bischof. Video made by the artists.