Created & Directed by Paul Herwig & Brian Evans

Choreography - Brian Evans
Sound Design - Brian Evans
Set - Paul Herwig
Lights - Paul Herwig
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REVIEW - MN Artists.org

review - MN PLAYLIST

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Off-Leash Area co-artistic director Paul Herwig and Stuart Pimsler principal dancer Brian Evans rejoin forces to revive and expand their 2012 collaboration about art-star Jean Michel Basquiat - the middle class Haitian and Puerto Rican boy who rose on the coattails of the burgeoning graffiti scene in the dilapidated New York City of the early 1980's.

Together Evans and Herwig present a poetic, dramatic, and evocative rumination on an immensely talented and self-destructive life that burned too brightly and too quickly for this world.

The show features scatological dance moves, a collaged text from multiple literary sources penned by critics and lovers, imagery from his artworks, and staging informed by Basquiat's painting style - loose, jazzy, and full of historical allusions. Evans plays the over-mythologized young painter in the tumultuous throws of his fame and talent, courting Death at every turn, who is played as a sometimes benign and sometimes threatening presence by Paul Herwig.

An exploratory version of SAMO was first performed in 2012, about which Caroline Palmer wrote in the Star Tribune:

"It makes sense that the doomed painter who upended the 1980s art world should have his fleeting life story told through purposefully messy and tumultuous movement. Evans' choreography captures the struggles of a young man overwhelmed by fame and the glare of his own talent. Herwig haunts him as both a deathly figure and as blasé mentor/rival Andy Warhol."