The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s work is still powerful and controversial thirty years after his death. His often erotic work makes the viewer automatically complicit in the extreme emotions it evokes: anger, desire, fear.

In Triptych, composer Bryce Dessner (known from his band The National), librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle and director Kaneza Schaal give the audience a fresh view of these pictures and at the same time question the stereotypical image of the black man as object of lust probes the ongoing urgency of questions around race, sexuality and objectification Mapplethorpe continues to evoke. They place the photographer in the midst of his own work,  with texts by Patti Smith, Essex Hemphill and Tuttle. The musical performance is by the phenomenal vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth and Asko|Schönberg. Triptych makes the audience part of a radical, uncompromising view of humanity, its body, feelings, pain and craving.

in collaboration with The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Artists