Thirty thoughts on The Head & the Load WILLIAM KENTRIDGE
I SHOUT THINK THINK THINK! THE FACT THE FACT THE FACT KABOOM! KABOOM! KABOOM! (This is a fair idea of progress.)
an essay, to not give a lecture. By that I mean to not start with a series of facts and knowledge that the makers of the piece have, which they give to an audience who they assume knows less than them, in the way that a teacher would give a lecture to a student. 2. The lecture we did not have
THESE ARE A SERIES OF NOTES made after the event,
a reverse engineering to find the thoughts and processes behind the production The Head & the Load. They are written after the first two iterations of the performance—in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London and in Duisburg, at the Ruhrtriennale. There is the clarity of hindsight, but what I want to track down is more than this. I want to see whether the starting principles of the piece hold. Can the making, the process itself, be a way of arriving at an understanding (in this case of the relationship of World War I to colonialism, a topic itself only revealed in the process of making)? And also (and in this question I am on uncertain grounds) to show whether, in the technique and process of making The Head & the Load, we can find an understanding of the history itself as a provisional construction of reconfigured fragments. 1. Neither hero nor villain
Is it possible to tell a story without telling it through the story of one individual—the girl, the soldier, the hero—standing in for the whole war? To make not a tragedy, which is always constructed around one person, perhaps not even a comedy. But to work from understanding history (or the past) as fragmented and understanding history as a construction of fragments that make a provisional understanding of the past. Here we have a choice: to hide the joints between the different fragments, or to show the white scars of the joints of the reconstructed vase and to show the completed vessel made up of so many shards. Our task was to make a piece of theater that has a trajectory rather than a narrative, but also to avoid
What we would have said in such a lecture: The first shots in anger in World War I were fired in Togo on August 3, 1914. The war in Africa finished ten days after the armistice, when news of the end of the war in Europe was confirmed. The campaigns in Togo, Cameroon, German South West Africa, German East Africa. The thirty thousand soldiers killed. The three hundred thousand porters or carriers killed (the vast majority through disease). The one million civilians dead. The chasing of the German, Paul von LettowVorbeck, in a campaign of cat and mouse in German East Africa. The hiding of boats in the side waterways. Carrying a boat from Cape Town to Lake Tanganyika. The resupply zeppelin that got as far as Khartoum. And the brief history of colonialism. 3. The completion of the Conference of Berlin
The lecture would have talked about the Conference of Berlin in 1884 in which the African continent was divided up between European powers in the hope of avoiding conflict. The fact that one could see World War I as the completion of the Conference of Berlin and the rearrangement of the map of Africa. All the German colonies—Togo, East Togo, Cameroon, German South West Africa, German East Africa—become either French or British at the end of the War, with sections given to Portugal and Belgium too. One could see the First World War as a colonial conflict; the struggle over Africa being played out both in Africa and in Europe.
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4. We offer a harvest of devotion
While The Head & the Load started as a project looking at Africa in the First World War, it developed into a project about the paradoxes of colonialism. This was not its starting point, but it is what the work itself, the material we were dealing with, pushed us toward. By the paradox, I mean the contradictory relationships toward Europe—the desire of Africans to be part of Europe, to share in the wealth and the richness of Europe, while wanting to resist Europe and its depredations. There was a desire on the part of many Africans to be part of the war. Blaise Diagne, the first black deputy in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris, demanded “the right to serve in the French army as all French citizens do. We offer a harvest of devotion.” Sol Plaatje, who had been to England to protest against the 1913 Land Act, which reserved most of the land in South Africa exclusively for the ownership and use of white South Africans, returned to South Africa and argued strongly for Africans to be allowed to fight in the war. Both Diagne and Plaatje hoped that civil rights would come after the war— equal rights as citizens, or at least an amelioration of the intolerable conditions under which Africans lived in the colonies. A hope that after colonial powers saw the sacrifices that Africans had made in the war, they would have to change their attitudes, behavior and laws. It was a vain hope. 5. We leave all for the consideration of the government
When I was an undergraduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1970s, studying colonial history, I came across the obscure history of a Baptist minister, John Chilembwe, who trained in the United States and returned to his native Nyasaland, and founded a church at the top of Chiradzulu Hill in the Shire Highlands. He came into conflict with neighboring white farmers. He wrote a letter to the Nyasaland Times at the start of the conflict, in 1914, entitled “The voice of the African native in the present war,” in which he stated: “In times of peace, everything for Europeans only, and instead of honour, we suffer humiliation
with names contemptible. But in time of war, it is found that we are needed to share the hardships, and shed our blood in equality…. If this is a war for honour, government gain of riches and so on, let the rich man, bankers, titlemen, shopkeepers, go to war and get shot. Instead the poor Africans who have nothing to own in this world, who in death leave only a long line of widows and orphans, and utter want and dire distress, are invited to die for a cause which is not theirs.” His letter ends, “We leave all for the consideration of the government. We hope in the mercy of almighty God that someday things will turn out well, and that justice will prevail. Signed John Chilembwe, on behalf of his countrymen.” Chilembwe’s letter was suppressed. It was never published. He led a colonial revolt. Chilembwe and his followers were executed. The brick church at the top of Chiradzulu Hill was dynamited, and images of the church before, during, and after its implosion were turned into postcards and then sold in aid of the English war effort. A copy of this letter has sat in a box in my studio for the last forty-five years, waiting its moment to be used. When the letter was taken out of the box and presented to the group, it was clear that it would be central to the production. But there was the question of how one changes this letter into a performance on stage. This has to do with the tone of the performance: a neutral reading, an angry performance to a crowd, an advocate arguing in a court of law. Is it done with or without other sounds? We tried with the voice of the reader being echoed by the chorus. We tried giving the sense of an echo of a megaphone in a large public space. We tried with the chorus only repeating the consonants. We cut it up with other contradictory texts. Should it be shown together with an image? With music under it? With music or other texts interrupting it? In the end we finally performed it with archival footage of African soldiers drilling (the only archival footage of the war used in the projections). The text is interrupted by song. It is cut up with a second voice, “Why do I hesitate? I must go and die for my country. Why should I go? I’m getting a good salary. Mr Sachs is a good employer. I must be a coward. I must have been born a pure coward.” 284
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6. Thinking in material
war, but we had a movement within a performer that could be placed on stage and, without saying a word, show many of the contradictions and paradoxes inside the colonial situation. Later on, after testing many different kinds of music, the movement was put together with a Schoenberg cabaret song for soprano, baritone, snare drum, and piccolo, and a series of military commands. Notes from an English colonial marching handbook were put in as a side event to the movement. How much could the moment hold? This is not a theoretical question. It depends on the strength of the performance (which of course changed evening to evening; some evenings it all held, sometimes the card house seemed very shaky). This was not an experiment, but rather a provisional, possible construction of a moment on the stage with the possibility of overload, of collapse inside the performance itself.
This reconstruction of ideas suggests there was a clarity of thinking from the beginning. But this clarity only arises when the project is finished. The work in process was much less coherent, and deliberately so. We needed to be led not only by books and texts. There was a loose gathering of possibilities to see how different fragments could talk to each other. There was traditional research at the Imperial War Museum: photos, letters, copies of military instructions. In different archives there was a search for African oral histories of the War (there were remarkably few of these that we could track down). We were looking both for the broad strokes, the broad shapes of what happened, but also for surprising thoughts, for particular turns of phrase, for the idiosyncratic. Looking for riddles with only half-formed answers rather than clear explications. Often the elliptical and enigmatic concision of lines from a song could show the way: They hope we will die and not return 8. Thinking in material 3: But that I will not do The text as raw material But will return home, To enjoy the company of beautiful women. We did not want dialogue: one character speaking to another, as in a conventional piece of theater. Texts as well as images and sounds could I did not want a didactic lecture. These are not be fragments to be cut up and reconfigured in new theoretical principles. I just knew that as a writer permutations. I was not a writer of dialogue, and we had done one production, The Refusal of Time, in which the lecture form was the mode of the piece. With The Head & the Load, the test was to see whether the mean7. Thinking in material 2 ing and the understanding could be given without We worked with Gregory Maqoma, a dancer who using either of these modes. Nonetheless, we didn’t can hold in his body what feels like contradictory simply want random nonsense as the final meaning impulses: a chest expanding in the military pout of the piece—though the use of nonsense was vital. The text was a collage; different texts cut up, as his head is pushed sideways and his lower torso collapses. We would improvise with many differ- different authors. The principal voices used in the ent rhythms of percussion, allowing the rhythm to piece were those of Frantz Fanon, Tristan Tzara, pull him one way or another, to hold in his body the John Chilembwe, Kurt Schwitters, and Sol Plaatjie. mixed impulses of whether to follow a command There were other fragments from Karl Kraus’s The or resist it, to want and not want to be part of the Last Days of Mankind, from a Swahili phrase book, colonial army. The spasm was primary; what we and many others. Phrases from books read during saw in his body, what we saw in the movements the eighteen months of making were put into a and resistance to movements. The movement is notebook of “WORDS.” Some I knew were conprimary and leads to a meaning that follows from nected to the piece, some I had not anticipated as the movement. We did not have a narrative history having a connection. Fragments from Svetlana of a single soldier to stand in for the history of the Alexievich’s book on the Soviet war in Afghanistan 285
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in the 1980s found their way in. By the end of this process of gathering there were hundreds of scraps of paper with phrases written on them, arranged in different configurations on a pin board, these fragments all waiting to find a shape, like the shards of several shattered vases waiting to be glued together, to make a new vessel. 9. Proverbs
O sleep, the poor man’s fat They have milked our goats dry The pool dried up while I was looking at it Darkness gossips about no one Hope causes no shame God’s opinion is unknown When a man dies, a man remains His back is fitted for the burden The hand never loses its way to the mouth Darkness has eaten her own child Hunger makes no man wise The pool ahead is not to be trusted 10. The shape of the vase
These were the starting points of the project: An invitation to make a performance for the Park Avenue Armory in New York, a vast hall measuring eighty by forty meters. A performance or an event or an installation not for a proscenium arch theater, and something that took account of the military associations of that building. Secondly, the project Triumphs and Laments in Rome, which we had made two years earlier. This was a five-hundred-meter-long frieze along the banks of the Tiber River. When the making of the images (created by washing dirt from the walls of the river) was complete, to launch the wall, we had a performance over two evenings on this five-hundred-meter-long stage with the audience watching from the other side of the river. We had two groups of musicians— one playing triumphs, one playing laments—that started at opposite ends of the stretch of the river and walked toward each other. After the Rome project, the Armory seemed like a miniature. I had anticipated that with
The Head & the Load, we could further develop many of the techniques that we had played with in Rome. These were primarily the use of shadows cast on the wall, shadows both of the performers but also of cut-out shapes they carried—of faces, of objects, of historical moments—literal loads and metaphoric loads. There were many thoughts of shadows that began in Rome but which did not have a place to develop there, which were held over and used when we made The Head & the Load. A third starting point was a production of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, which I and my team had made for the Salzburg Festival the year before. The conceit of the production was thinking of Berg’s Wozzeck as a premonition of the First World War. This is where the War and the ideas around it entered the project. 11. The workshop
All projects—even those which end up on a stage— are developed in my studio in Johannesburg. A good space with simple technologies: camera, video projectors, costumes left from previous work. A space for working with actors and performers; and a smaller studio space for working on the stage model of the project. For Wozzeck, with my team of costume and set designers, Greta Goris and Sabine Theunissen, the video designer Catherine Meyburgh, video editors Janus Fouché and Žana Marović, the studio staff of constructors, Chris Waldo de Wet and Jacques van Staden, and the group of Johannes burg actors and dancers, we would gather to work out the staging that the singers in Salzburg would eventually follow when performing Wozzeck. In the protected and heated space of the studio, wonderful things develop. For Wozzeck, there were dancers with chairs, there was a choreography of shell shock, there was shadow puppetry, some elements used and some not used in the final production. And, of course, the knowledge that the final production in Salzburg would be made with an Austrian chorus and singers and not the Johannesburg chorus and dancers. There were so many things not used. There was so much left at the edge of the production, that as we started on the next production, many of the 286
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items called to be looked at again, to be brought back onto stage. This was the heart of the start of The Head & the Load. To start from the team: the designers, the performers, the musicians. From this the project developed.
was a possibility of what something might eventually feel like on stage with projection, sound, light, costume. No script and no libretto is both a pleasure and a terror. One has the deep reassurance of the known libretto and score of an opera, the fact that it has been done before, that one knows it can work and that one’s task then is to find the 12. No script, no libretto meaning between the libretto and the music, and For the Rome project, I had worked with Philip a new vision. With The Head & the Load, all was Miller, with whom I have worked for twenty-four possible. We could shape things as we wished. The years, and Thuthuka Sibisi, a new collaborator for trouble was, we did not wish. We had to find what the music for Triumphs and Laments. I invited the material itself suggested and what we needed them to join the team for making The Head & the to do when it was in our hands. This was the work Load, to find the musical language of the piece. Col- of the next eighteen months. laborations never start from an emptiness, they start from the work that we have done before, or each other’s work that we have seen before. 13. 14-18 NOW There was a familiarity of a way of working, which involves using a mixture of found and altered musi- It’s difficult to remember quite how the project cal material—a collage, often from within one piece came together. We knew we had a wide stage, we of music, and a collage of different pieces. A ver- knew we had the army, we knew we had World sion of God Save the King that Philip and Thuthuka War I, we knew we had Johannesburg performers, had used in an earlier project came into the work- the idea of a procession, shadows, we knew we had shop. We worked with a group of musicians in New porters and carriers. The meeting with the 14-18 NOW festival focused the piece thematically to be York, the Knights, also a new collaboration. In the first days of improvisation with them, specifically about World War I. It gave the projthere were many musical ideas: making the sound ect a deadline: it had to be before the end of the of a machine gun using drumsticks on the strings centenary of the war. It became specific, not just of a double bass, the hiss of an old gramophone theoretical. The team had to consolidate itself, we made with a violin played very close to the bridge, had to change gear, we needed this external push. and breath in a French horn, the sound of a gas We could then write to the Armory to describe shell being fired. When the large-scale workshop the project as if it had all been worked out, as if of sixty participants began in my studio, there was we knew what we were doing. a wealth of materials waiting to be used: different musical fragments and pieces of animation (some made specifically for the project, but also older 14. The first Johannesburg workshop, pieces) waiting to be tested and to see what hapNovember 2017 pened when we put movement and image together. There were new costumes designed spe- Sixty people in the studio downtown and a smaller cifically for the production, or ideas for new cos- domestic studio to make the model. The project tumes, but there were also older costumes and had to become finite. The seven projectors we had props made for Wozzeck: disused gas masks, over- first envisaged became three. We worked on the alls, and other garments, a range of colors which geometry of projectors to work out the scale of the had been in previous productions. Not that we shadows. The work of how to populate the fiftyanticipated using them in their existing form at five-meter-long stage was done using a four-meter the workshop, but rather starting with this rich- model in the studio. I came with many fragments of text, Philip ness of material directly visible in front of us so that even in the roughest improvisation, there and Thuthuka came with fragments of music; 287
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some of The Knights musicians came from New York, other musicians from Johannesburg. There were performers I knew. Some we had worked with for many years before. Some had come through the art center, the Centre for the Less Good Idea. As often, there was much more team than project, but during the course of the workshop the performers found and made their roles. Philip and Thuthuka found the singers and chorus they wanted, the orchestration was done with a series of e-mails between Johannesburg and New York. The days were spent in a mixture of rehearsing and watching. The chorus and the musicians having to master the provisional pieces of music. The performers having to learn how to carry the shadow cut-outs that had been made in the studio prior to the workshop and those that were made during the course of the ten-day workshop. (These shadows included a boat in three parts; loads that were literal, cut-outs that looked like loads; loads that were metaphoric, like an entire mine shaft and head gear carried on someone’s shoulders; loads that were historic, figures from past and future African independence movements, nationalist leaders who would be carried like saints in a religious procession.) There is a process of watching different images and listening to different pieces of music and seeing how they talk to each other. Animated explosions, which we listened to with the loudest, most percussive, most raucous music that had been written—this was how we had expected the explosions to be—and then watching those same explosions with the much quieter music of a Satie song. We put Hindemith piano music together with the percussion of a Pedi dance. This was not done for the pleasure of contradiction, but to see how different sounds and images revealed themselves when not used in the most obvious way.
war. An irony, in that black South African participants had not been given rifles, but returned from war with this dance as if they had been soldiers. (South African black participants were categorized as laborers and therefore not eligible for medals or rifles, but the dance was as if they had been full combatants.) We did improvisations based on this YouTube video and many of the dancers and singers joined in. We put this against the Hindemith music. One dancer with ballet training shifted between dancing en pointe, in other words resisting all gravity, and changing to the earth-bound flat stomping of the Pedi dance. This both worked and did not work. Right up to the first performance it was uncertain whether the piece should stay in or not stay in. It was unclear quite what it meant. This was an uncertainty as to the shift of meaning across the foot lights. Would what it meant to the performers—their mastery, their skill, the pleasure in this dance—be the same to the audience? Or would there be a distance which could turn the dance into a piece of exoticism? The dance itself would not change, but the meaning would. The dance and its position were consolidated when we worked with a variation on the sound. Microphones were placed under the stage so the foot stomps sounded as loud as artillery fire. And there was a section in the center which was completely silent; the microphone switched off and the feet hardly touching the ground, the only sound being that of the tinnitus, of the silence after the artillery fire made by the chorus playing thin different notes on harmonicas around the room. 16. Harmonicas
The idea of harmonicas came from a list of items that were sent to African troops by the Committee for the Welfare of African Troops in Europe. The things they sent included: 26 gramophones 15. The Pedi dance 634 records 30 sets of dominoes One of the actors showed us a YouTube video of a 1 bagatelle board dance done in the northern part of South Africa. 600 hymn and prayer books Men in kilts doing a dance based on an exagger108 colored handkerchiefs ated march, as if this is what had been done in the 288
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1,600 pairs of leather gloves 1,250 school primers 120 packets of ink powder 600 mouth organs We used the harmonicas to make silence, as we had used drumsticks on the strings of a double bass to make machine-gun fire, bugle calls played on a viola. There was no rifle in evidence in the production, but a spade was used for drilling.
But this list was full of enough possibilities for me to go on with drawing, and to go on with constructing the text or libretto; for Catherine Meyburgh to work on ideas for the projections; for Philip Miller and Thuthuka to continue with the music, that which was still to be written, that which needed to be rewritten, that which needed to be shaped; for Greta Goiris to continue with ideas of the paper skirts we tested in the Pedi dance, with other costumes that were a mixture of military and non-military, with the finding 17. Route map of the particular clothes for particular members of the chorus; for Sabine Theunissen to develop her By the end of the workshop, we had a provisional thoughts for objects and constructions on stage. After the workshop we had some idea structure: of the geometry of the projections. There were Act I: Manifestos many objects still to be made in the studio, some Manifestos of which had been made in models on a miniature Orders and commands scale that were halfway between sculpture, set, Cutting up the continent Simple arithmetic (recruiting the carriers) or props, things that could both cast a shadow on the screen and also capture a projection between The procession to war the projector and the back tarpaulin. The most Act II: Paradox remarkable objects we had were all based on very Eight things we must remember specific designs of machines from the First World Troubles of the body War: giant metal ears for the early detection of Chilembwe’s letter airplanes in the pre-radar era. The man with a cat in his mouth Damaged heads, God Save the King Act III: War Running 18. Horizontal and vertical Running and falling Wounded man dance Our starting point was the width of the stage, Procession from war the eighty meters of the Park Avenue Armory A list of the dead and in the end the fifty-five-meter length of our stage. We started with the idea of different musical These were titles. We were not sure what forces at each end (this came from the Triumphs many of the sections would become, but we had and Laments musical ideas in Rome). Europe at a skeleton of the production waiting to be fleshed one end of the stage, Africa at the other, and a out, a structure from which to hang the various space of negotiation in between. Musically, this fragments we gathered. became Africa’s choral and percussive tradition The section called “Paradox” included many at one end, European high modernism at the intriguing but obscure fragments, which we listed, other. We started listening to Satie, Hindemith, uncertain what they might mean: Ravel, Schoenberg. We were working with African a huge mask of a mosquito (abandoned) church four-part harmonies. a white ghost puppet (used, though none This gave us a horizontal extent. Then of us knew what it meant) through the middle, vertically, we dropped the twenty-three gas masks (we used one) Dadaists. Not so much an extra voice to add to shadow monuments (abandoned) the music—though this as well—but as a strategy three hymns and laments (two abandoned, for working, to work with what they showed us, one reworked) the cut-up, the illogical. They showed a strategy of 289
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World War euphemistic locutions: working with all the material we had. Simultaneity was one element, like the Dada simultaneous poem, the dead on the battlefield are the “fallen” three different performers reading in-between and the blood of young men is “sweet red wine over each other. To make an argument not proof youth” gressing logically from a series of propositions dead bodies constitute “ash” or “dust” to a conclusion, but to have a series of different the “lady” and “wife” come from lines of thoughts on top and next to each other, often with a popular song from 1915. no obvious connection. Frantz Fanon and Tristan Tzara, but making an argument both from this disIn the center of this—as a demonstration of language and non-language—was a section of Kurt sociation and about this disconnection. Schwitter’s Ursonate, written after the First World War, but indebted to the sound poems developed by the Dadaists in the Zurich cabarets in 1916. 19. The passionate absurd This is a text for the extension of the Conference The colonial incomprehension—Europe not of Berlin. The sound of a rational argument hiding understanding Africa, Africa uncomprehending a deep irrationality. Performed as if the syllables of Europe’s intentions (no-one could quite com- had a meaning: Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, pögiff, Kwii Ee. prehend the depth of the venality). This found This is what we are here to decide. expression in the range of languages used on stage. dll rrrrr beeeee bö Some simple translations, Frantz Fanon in siSwati, I think we are in agreement here Tristan Tzara in isiZulu. Translations became one dll rrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö, of the forms of the piece, a kind of broken telemore than that, we are delighted to be here, phone along the length of the stage, English into rrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö wö, isiZulu into French back into English, translations to be here with colleagues and friends, and mistranslations projected onto the screen. beeeee bö fümms bö wö tää, These projected translations also provided route friends and colleagues for we have markers, key signposts of language—for the audience, but more importantly, for us, as we made the greatest respect, bö fümms bö wö tää zää, the piece. When we were lost, we could go back to with whom we are united in respect and the twenty or thirty key phrases. honor. These translations are only one of an endless set of possible meanings, but the syllables are pronounced as if they had a meaning. The performance But language is also cut up language. There is goes from rousing agreement to the three actors Morse code made of Hungarian phrases, German fighting over the map like dogs fighting over a bone: Rum! phrases, English phrases, messages sent from Rrummpff ? Africa to Europe (from one end of the stage to Rum! another), hovering at the edge of comprehenRrummpff t? sibility, a series of words unmoored from their Rr rr rum! context. Rrummpff tll? Who who Dust Ash Rr rr rr rr rum! Who’s your ladyfriend Rrummpff tillff ? Ash dust is the lady dust Dust Rr rr rr rr rr rum! Your wife Dash Rrummpff tillff toooo? (“Ash” and “dust” standing in for “dot” Rr rr rr rr rr rr rum! and “dash”) Rrummpff tillff toooo? Ziiuu! “Ash” and “dust” come from a list of First 20. Let us try for once not to be right
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Rr rr rr rr rr rr rr rum! Rrummpff tillff toooo? Ziiuu ennze ziiuu nnzkrrmüüüü! Rr rr rr rr rr rrumm!!!!!!!!!! It becomes a language untethered from the world, where what we are left with are the growls, grunts, puffs of air, sounds of emotions of anger, greed, jealousy. 21. Language untethered
We make an attempt to think through non-language (to show the limits of language—its role to hide and lie as much as to clarify) in the same way we use the body and its movements to find meaning. A body collapsing and resurrected, teaching a corpse to salute, learning the careful control of neck, shoulder, fine muscles, to construct what appears as a simple collapse. The thinking happens in improvisation, in rehearsal; the mastery of the movement learned in the same way that the Ursonate nonsense has to come through a mastery of rhythm, the dynamics of the pitch of the voice, as we would master a dance or a song. We relied on the performance of the Pedi dance to teach us its meaning. 22. What do we see on stage?
We have a platform fifty-five meters long, twelve meters deep. We have heavy military tarpaulins suspended at the back of the stage, making a screen fifty-five meters long and ten meters high. The images are made by three projectors at the front of the stage and there is a series of objects between the projectors and the screen that both catch fragments of projection and cast their shadows on the screen. A turntable with a pylon, ladders, ramps, trolleys, a collapsible packing crate to hold the orchestra, a smaller crate that opens to hold a cabaret performance. The stage is divided into triangles of light (within the beam of the projectors) and darkness (in the gaps between the projectors), where no shadows are shown. Everything moves. The crates, the ladders, the performers moving in and out of the beams of the projectors, moving backward and
forward in the beam of the projectors. Close to the front of the stage and close to the projectors, the shadows cast by performers or objects fill the ten-meter height of the tarpaulin screen. Close to the back of the stage, a shadow cast is approximately life-size. 23. Tummelplatz
These are the materials with which to discover the piece: Stage Music Text Movement Projection The stage is a place of exploration, a playground, a space of contestation, a space for one continent to call to another, for music on one side of the stage to call to music at the other. It has to be a safe space for uncertainty, even stupidity. Every impulse is given the benefit of the doubt, worked on, letting it develop and flower and only then (or only after it has had its space in the performance) is a judgment made as to whether it should stay in the final piece. It is not quite the same as the free association of the psycho-analytic space, the psycho-analytic Tummelplatz—the term and strategy Freud was developing at the same time as the wild play of the Dadaists (in his 1914 article “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”), but it shares the belief that we know more than we know we know, and we have to find techniques to allow this knowledge to emerge. 24.
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25. Lest their behavior merit recognition
I had for the war. All Quiet on the Western Front, stereoscopic photographs of the Flanders trenches, the great English war poets, took all my air.
Africans went to war hoping that, after the war, their contribution and sacrifices would be recognized and they would be given a different dispen27. Poetry in a minor key sation. But instead of freedom, they were given a greatcoat and a bicycle. But even these compen- In The Head & the Load, Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem sations are treasured. Actors within the company for Doomed Youth” makes an appearance, but only remembered their grandfathers’ bicycles and coats, in a misremembered French translation: Quelles cloches sonner pour ceux qui... as special family objects they were forbidden quelles cloches quelles cloches to touch. qui meurent comme des bêtes Seule la colère des canons pa pa pa pa des mitraillettes, Mitraillettes 26. Three kinds of ignorance peuvent ponctuer leur oraisons? Hâtives. At one stage the poem was translated into a When the project began, one of its energies was a frustration, a frustration at my own ignorance dog barking and into crows shrieking, but these were about the material, about the war in Africa. I did later taken from Wilfred Owen and placed in the not have a sense of having a series of good ideas, speech of the Kaiser. It is not that there weren’t other rather I had an anger at myself of how I could not histories and voices, but the ones I knew were so have known this history (an ignorance I shared loud, so present, they drowned out any other sound. The third ignorance is a slowness in making not only with my audience, but also with the other connection. Allowing fragments to remain as fragparticipants in the project). I think there are three kinds of ignorance ments. A blindness to possible connections. Not nechere. Firstly, a deliberately constructed igno- essary connections, but possible connections and rance, a conscious effort by those in power—the associations. It needs a heating up, a galvanizing of colonial powers—to silence voices, to hide his- energy for these connections to spark. This almost tory. The suppression of Chilembwe’s letter can always happens indirectly, involuntarily rather stand in for this. But also, the absence of memo- than through cold analysis. The misuse of a form, rials to Africans who died or to their contribu- a mistranslation. For example, dancing en pointe tion to the war, the absence of medals, the fact to the drumming of the Pedi dance; or looking at that they were not allowed to participate in the explosions designed to go with the loudest and most 1919 victory parades, were deliberate acts of energetic music—blasts of a tuba and trombone, bass erasure. “Lest their behavior merit recognition, and snare and djembe drums—putting these images their deeds must not be recorded,” wrote one with the rehearsing of a romantic Satie song. This heating up is the richest part of the colcolonial officer. The second ignorance I am complicit laborative process. Ideas and images tumbling over in. Every Remembrance Sunday in November each other, an over-determination of the project. the headmaster would read out the names of ex- These connections happen during improvisations, pupils and masters who had died in the war (while taking a section of material designed for or anticstudent cadets stood at the corner of the ceno- ipated for one part of the project and placing it in taphs with arms reversed). From English lessons a completely different context. The most obvious filled with Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, connections are usually the least interesting, and my mind was stuck. The war was solidified into the ones that arrive through all these other prothose sounds. It was sufficient. Our conver- cesses are what give new insight, not just into the sation was with these English boys, not with material we are working with, but sometimes illuthe hundreds of thousands of African carriers. minate the corners of the larger questions behind A few images, sounds, and words filled the space the project itself. 292
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THIRTY THOUGHTS…
28.
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30.
_____ __ __ ___ _ ___ _ __ _ __ _ _______ _ _____ ___ __ : : __ _ __ : ___ ta : ___ taa ta tatta ____ _ _ __ __ __ _ ___ _ __
In every project there is a period in which everything is doomed to be a disaster. Previous projects in which the same feeling prevails, somehow rescued themselves. But this time, with this material, how can it not be a calamity? There is no story. The text doesn’t make sense. There is no logic to what we are doing. These are the 4 a.m. thoughts, when the crow of anxiety will always find one branch or another to land on. My wife’s admonition rings in my unsleeping ear, “The people you are working with are gold. Don’t spin this into fool’s gold.” The storms that rage through my head at this time are directed at my own inabilities. How to put the different pieces together? How to hold a space of change and uncertainty against different contentions from the collaborators? How to order the structure of the procession to war to balance the order of the shadows, their timing, with the music? A series of practical questions, but also the larger questions of what the whole piece means, spin through my head. The entire project is reconstructed three times between 4 and 5 a.m. I realize I have no way of trying to coordinate the tempo of the live performance with the timing of the shadows. I anticipate the different conversations with the stage manager, the conductor, the composer. I’m not sure this is a constructive panic, but it is an inevitable part of the project. And it does seem to hold all the images and all the elements in the air at the same time (ready to crash down) and perhaps also, I hope, it does keep possible connections open. I’m waiting to be rescued by all the elements finding their own route rather than feeling I am a captain able to steer this ship into any safe port.
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