The new space company dramatises the French cult film La Haine for a group of international actors and young migrants. Hate is a site specific promenade performance using break dance, rap, graffiti and comic as its vocabulary to tell a story of exclusion. More

Hate – La Haine is considered a milestone of 1990s French cinema. The film focuses on a single day in the lives of three young friends in an impoverished French suburb, in the aftermath of a riot involving a clash with the police. Volker Schmidt adapts the plot for the Leopoldau Gasworks, an abandoned industrial site at the urban periphery of Vienna. The French banlieue becomes an imaginary suburb, a no-man’s-land at the margins of an unspecified European metropolis. With an international ensemble composed of multilingual performers and young people with migration background, the director tells his story as a play split up into several stations, a tour through the lebensraum of the marginalised and deprived, always on the run from the police. Breakdancing, rap, graffiti, comics and satire are their vocabulary to give voice to their impotence. After komA, which won the 2008 Nestroy Prize for best off-production, new space company present another theatre experience of great immediacy in an unusual location.