Peripheral thoughts on a sonic landscape THUTHUKA SIBISI
THE HEAD & THE LOAD PROVIDES considerations of
violence and memory—the physical and psychological crevices of the black body that carry this burden—and the negotiations that ensue to relieve the bones of this deadweight seem particularly immense. As Anita Pilgrim would put it, this project “has not been to write a polemic championing the Black cause but an account of certain political processes enacted through embodied practice. What is productive [here is addressing the] ‘tension’ between subjective understanding and [the creative] method”1. Furthermore, this project doesn’t concern itself with directly answering a/the question but rather revels in its question-ness—a sort of meandering on the potentiality for a resolution. When looking at addressing the archive by relying on actions—a quasi-Duchampian strategy—what is illuminated is a way to engage with a somewhat dormant archive by way of contrast. Another way of looking at this would be to consider performance-making in the same way one would the scores of John Cage, which can be realized in various interpretations, whereby the work is continually resurrected in its making. It is important to consider these recipes for action not as mere copies or reconstructions from one place or time to another but rather as a thorough investigation into the very porousness of its sound construction—a metaphorical pulling and twisting of the rubbery boundaries of style and form. Perhaps this can be taken a step further as a single instruction (writing the self to counter the misrepresentation of being written about): to sound a note as it hadn’t sounded before. This instruction within the context of the piece “God Save the King,” for example, could be intuited by mutating an existing structure: sound as you haven’t sounded before. One question that arose throughout the preparation of the production was where to draw the line between over- and under-rehearsing—the place and process of improvisation versus set structure, when to use the element of surprise versus controlled frames, etc. So even though certain actions became set in conjunction with carefully constructed music, the “live” processes of fragmentation and reassembly are given freedom and flexibility (here, the trope becomes multilateral between sound and action).
The actions that could be employed in finding a resolution include: slowing something down, augmentation (lengthening notes), speeding it up, diminution (halving the value of notes), splitting or repeating phrases, sonic retrograde or inversion, and the use of anagrams and palindromes. To explain this further, one can give thought to an idea that comes from a phrase—an idea arising from watching or hearing something in the workshop, possibly relating to the rhythm, text, or phrase of something else. This idea is then tested in the studio with the singer(s) and in the final steps one may leave room for it all to be altered digitally. What used to be the sole activity of the composer, i.e., sitting with a piece of paper writing notes, becomes a number of multilateral processes through which the music is stitched together. In a way, until these ideas are tested, one never quite knows which fragments will be revealing, interesting, or strange. Here the studio/ workshop becomes essential to the process of writing and making, invariably resulting in a quasiscientific sonic experiment. During the making of The Head & the Load five themes arose: 1. dislocation, 2. embodiment, 3. imagination, 4. collaboration, and 5. a timememory-space conundrum (in no particular order). In relation to dislocation, what comes to mind is a perverse questioning of what it could mean to be presented outside of yourself—a proclivity to being othered which many have come to accept as part of the rigmarole of being disbanded from home and oneself. As a result, bodies are marked as ideological sites, “spaces where a variety of discourses cross and converge . . . written on by discourses of power and domination.”2 “In this condition of critical reverie, which feels at once ‘transgressive and hallucinatory’, thoughts and sensations are directed by a poetic touch that loosens the stream of semiotic material from rigid adherence to sedimented conventions.”3 Secondly, in contemplating the place of embodiment in the discourse of the black body I am urged to uncover the continued and sometimes distorted ideas around anti-/race(-ism), black power, and metaphors of blackness by considering the place of behavioral, emotional, physical, and cognitive responses which feed into the creation of sometimes unstable narratives.
1.
Anita Naoko Pilgrim, “Feeling for Politics: The Translation of Suffering and Desire in Black and Queer Performativity,” (Sociology thesis, University of London). 2.
Elisabeth MermannJozwiak, “Re-membering the Body: Body Politics in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 12, no. 2 (2001). 3.
Kobena Mercer, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices Since the 1980s, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
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THUTHUKA SIBISI 4.
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 5.
Dennis Orgeron, “Re-membering History in Isaac Julien’s ‘The Attendant,’” Film Quarterly 53, no. 4 (Summer 2000). 6.
Carole Becker and Okwui Enwezor, “A Conversation with Okwui Enwezor,” Art Journal 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002). 7.
Mbembe (2017).
With respect to a time-memory-space conundrum, allow me to revert back to imperfect language; where race sits within a gray realm. Moreover, let race be contemplated as a complex and ambivalent mechanism based on obdurate structures which, in effect, remain simply as a form of representation. As Achille Mbembe intimates: “[Race] sends us, above all, back to surface simulacra. Taken to its limit, race becomes a perverse complex, a generator of fears and torments, of disturbed thoughts and terror, but especially of infinite sufferings and, ultimately, catastrophe.”4 The aforementioned conundrum and it’s devastating culture further gestures toward the conceptual sonic imagining of The Head & the Load. Thinking about imagination and collaboration, I consider previous processes of documentation as subjective and static. As a means of puncturing this point of frozen subjectivity, the aim is to unmute this conversation through the idea that “fantasy occurs individually, that it is constructed, and that it is, by its very nature, exclusive.”5 This proposition invariably encouraged a way to metaphorically grind down through the surface, dissect, subvert, and rewrite traditional notions of history. Isaac Julien speaks of it more poetically, naming history a “motionless memorialization,” and here I follow in his path in a want toward the breaking of this suggested stasis by way of disruption without concern. What arises through this collaborative effort is an artistic representation that humanizes and gives voice to a part of history long unknown by contemporary audiences and which previously has primarily been documented through written diaries, academic papers, and archival images. In the words of the late Okwui Enwezor, “we have to reexamine the historical relationship between Africa and Europe. It is a very traumatic and often impossible history to articulate without any sense of shame, and it is not a one-way thing . . . . So this forces the question . . . how does one think historically in the present?”6 Finally, for me, having experienced and come from a musical tradition that stipulates itself according to a binary—i.e., West vs. the other— what comes to the fore is how the West concretely safeguards itself and its boundaries. What reveals itself here, as a consequence, is my need to disrupt
this positioning by planting myself in the center of this dichotomy and becoming the friction that can summon, envision, or engender a new, more original conversation concerned with how we create sound-worlds, who we write these worlds for, and whose stories we tell through these sounds and practice. “Everything, then, starts with an act of identification: I am Black. The act of identification is based on a question that we ask of ourselves: Who, then, am I? Or else it is a response to a question asked of us, a summons: Who are you? In all these cases identity is unveiled and made public. But to unveil one’s identity is also to recognize oneself. It is a form of self-recognition. It is to know who you are and to speak it or, better, to proclaim it—to say it to oneself. The act of identification is also an affirmation of existence. I am signifies, from that moment forward, I exist.”7
South African composer, performer, and conductor THUTHUKA SIBISI has toured extensively throughout South Africa, Europe, Asia, and South America, including as Associate Conductor and Chorus Master for Bongani Ndonana-Breen’s oratoria Credo, and as Musical Director of Philip Miller’s opera Between A Rock and A Hard Place, William Kentridge’s Ciné-Concert, part of Notes Toward a Model Opera, and of Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments. Further projects and engagements include visual collaborations with the Johannesburg-based photographer and sculptor Jake Singer, a stint as Chorus Master for UCT Opera School, and a commission by Cape Town Opera for Musiquées Sacrée d’Afrique et d’Europe, in residence at Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence. He is a recipient of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans 2017 award and a 2018 Ampersand Foundation Fellow.
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