HEAVILY UNDERESTIMATED GEMS

Recommended age range 12+

“I wanted to understand how two bodies can hold each other without getting lost. What we become when we love too hard — and how we make it out alive.”— Bast Hippocrate

Heavily Underestimated Gems is a gay love fable where the body becomes the terrain of struggle and reconciliation. It is an attempt to understand what love does to us, to our limits, to our identities. A descent into tenderness, fusion, dependency, violence — followed by a gesture of rebirth.

The piece explores the embrace as a choreographic and political practice. To hold each other is already a negotiation. It is to surrender while maintaining one’s boundaries.

It is to experience the risk of dissolving into the other, and the necessity of finding oneself again. In this space between trust and tension, bodies shape each other, becoming living matter in a dialogue without words.

Heavily Underestimated Gems continues research, where the intimate illuminates the collective. Starting from the micro to reach the macro, it explores desire, vulnerability, and the power of bodies in relation. 

Letters from a past love — rediscovered as vestiges driven by the desire to understand — have nourished the dramaturgy of movement. They infuse the piece with their fragility and persistence: everything we wanted to say, and could not say otherwise. Everything I try to transcribe through the body.

The soundtrack acts as a space of memory and resistance. Sound fragments, breaths, and reworked, deconstructed pieces of pop culture haunt the piece as echoes of the collective.

Pop is no longer decorative: it becomes a shared language, a common matter where the personal meets the political, where intimate ruins resonate with a communal pulse.

It as a story of love that survives love.

Bast Hippocrate is a Swiss, Afro-descendant, queer artist of second-generation immigrant background. His practice is characterized by the staging of raw, magnetic bodies, where vulnerability, physicality, and porosity intersect with societal and interpersonal themes. Through an approach rooted in autofiction, he explores human relationships and the ways our intimate stories resonate collectively, building bridges between the micro and the macro, the personal and the political.

After an autodidactic journey, he obtained a Bachelor’s degree from La Manufacture HES-SO Lausanne in 2019. His creations, notably LoveLettersOrNot (2021) and Heavily Underestimated Gems (2025), interrogate intimacy, the complexity of relationships, and the navigation of personal trauma with tenderness and intensity. Bast Hippocrate develops his projects at the crossroads of dance, performance, and storytelling, often enriched by pop music and autofictional narratives.

This production was part of the 2026 edition of the Swiss Selection in Avignon.

Premiere: March 20 – 22, 2025, TPR – Théâtre Populaire Romand, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.

Photos by: Salomé Guyot, Tomás Laranjo, Pascal Gely, Pietro Bertora.

Instagram: @hippocrate_

Website: https://oh-la-la.ch/en/artistes/bast-hippocrate

The festival “New Baltic Dance” is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, the Vilnius City Municipality, the Lithuanian Culture Institute, and the EU.