It has been five years since The Head and the Load, William Kentridge’s ambitious project about the experiences of Africans in World War 1, debuted on a 75m stage in the Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern. After much negotiation and planning, and the abandoning of a wild idea that it would be mounted in the concourse of Joburg’s Park Station, the production was scheduled to take place at the Joburg Theatre in April 2020. Covid-19 put paid to that.
Much has been written in the international press about the initial performances of what's best described as a gesamtkunswerk (total artwork). It uses performance, dance, music, animation, projection and a multitude of languages and references to present a fragmented collage inspired by the criminally underexplored history of African involvement in the war. There’s even a publication from 2020 that offers sumptuous photographs and illuminating essays about the process of its creation by Kentridge and his collaborators — co-composers Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi, dancer and choreographer Gregory Maqoma, historian David Olusoga and seminal cultural theorist Homi K Bhabha. South African audiences who were unable to see the piece in London, New York, Germany, the Netherlands or Miami, may have seen elements of it in the 2018 exhibition Kaboom in 2018 at Joburg's Goodman Gallery or online. None of this can substitute for the experience of watching it live, an opportunity we'll finally have when it begins its run at the Joburg Theatre later this month. Mounted on a specially constructed 53m performance space in the backstage area of the main theatre, where a small audience will sit on the stage only five or six metres from the performers, The Head and the Load is what Kentridge describes as a 90-minute immersive work intended not as a history lesson or lecture, but “a test to see if we can, in the actual performance, give information and, through [a] system of collage, take people on a journey and they come out knowing more, with different perceptions about the war, than they had at the beginning”.
The production is a milestone in the development of his artistic practice. It goes a significant way to answering his interrogation of whether there’s a way of making a theatre project the way you'd make a drawing
Taking its title from a Ghanaian proverb, “The head and the load are the troubles of the neck”, the piece focuses on the experiences of the hundreds of thousands of Africans who served in the war as porters and carriers. Most weren't permitted to carry weapons and 300,000 died, mostly as a result of diseases such as malaria and dysentery.
It also considers the different responses of Africans to the war. Some believed that assistance to European powers would result in civil rights and better treatment after the conflict. Others, like Malawian Baptist minister John Chilembwe, whose suppressed and unpublished letter to the Nyasaland Times in 1914 forms a key part of the production's text, decried the injustices of the colonial condition that during “times of peace, everything for Europeans only ... But in time of war, it is found that we are needed to share the hardships and shed our blood in equality”.
Kentridge, who came upon Chilembwe’s letter as an undergraduate at Wits University in the 1970s and kept a copy in a box for 45 years until he unearthed it as part of his research, saw these attitudes to the war — “wanting to go, refusing to go; wanting to connect to Europe, wanting to separate” — as forming a key thread. “But it also became what we were looking for: in the music, in the movement — which moments pull that position out again?”
For Maqoma that moment was provided during workshops for the production at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoca) in 2018, where he developed the “dance of the wounded man”. It explores these contradictions through a push-pull bodily conflict. “It's really about surviving the structure, the hierarchies, the mere fact of being in war,” he said.
Longtime Kentridge collaborator, composer Miller, disrupted hierarchies through his use of music “that imagined a sonic world that could express the idea of talking back to Europe from Africa”, incorporating pieces by European modernists like Schoenberg, Ravel and Satie with African music, “in not so much a conversation — that’s maybe too polite — but in a barrage of sound thrown back into Europe in an interesting way [that demonstrates] that many of the things that the modernists were trying to do were actually what African music was already doing”.
Co-composer Sibisi said: “The work tries to find ways to question the position of Africa in Europe and Europe in Africa, and how these two sound worlds are constantly in friction or complement ... There was something about remaining in the 'question-ness' of the question, meandering through different terrains, sonically and visually. It wasn’t about a singular outcome — there was never a singular goal.” Kentridge notes: “We didn't know the answers or that this was the message we wanted to tell people at the end; it’s more like these were the questions we were intrigued by and if we were intrigued by them, hopefully other people would be.”
Kentridge returns to Joburg after an explosively busy post-pandemic period which included two massive retrospectives at the Royal Academy in London and The Broad Museum in Los Angeles; a recent run of performances at the Barbican in London of his opera Sybil, for which he received the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera this week; and the production of a forthcoming nine-part film series, Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, available for streaming later this year. He is, however, excited to see “whether it’s simply a polite watching, an engaged watching or a participation in the energy of the piece” that South African audiences will offer when they get their chance to engage with The Head and the Load.
Sibisi believes watching the piece in person is the only way to see it: “The stage length creates room for all these elements to exist at the same time — the elements are constantly in operation; sometimes together, sometimes against each other. The interplay is what really makes the installation.”
Miller feels it’s a huge work. “You end up saying: 'Did we actually make that? This happened?' It’s a rich, complex work. I feel very good about how the music came out and about the end product.”
Hamilton Dlamini will be performing without his co-star and key project collaborator, actor Mncedisi Shabangu, who died last year, but he believes the work is a tribute Shabangu’s talents. “He was a brilliant creative and a team player,” Dlamini says. “It's the best thing I've done in my career. We’re bringing it to Joburg so it can feel the African ground. South Africans will get to see the show and interpret it in their own way. It’s a mix of high art, satire — a concoction of approaches — and it’s unbelievably beautiful.”
It will mark one of the last opportunities for South African audiences to see veteran dancer Maqoma on stage before his retirement next year. “I hope audiences will appreciate the meaning of bringing this show to South Africa because we're telling the story of Africans who went into war. There’s no better way of showing that respect and commemorating their lives than by bringing this work to the continent.”
Kentridge has moved on to other works and themes, but The Head and the Load is a milestone in the development of his artistic practice. It goes a significant way to answering his interrogation of whether there’s a way of making a theatre project the way you'd make a drawing. “In the traditional operas like The Nose, Lulu, Woyzeck ... there’s a given piece of music, a libretto. What can you do with that? This is more like a drawing: here’s the sheet of paper and it’s going to be a conversation between you and the drawing that’s been made. I think of it as an extended drawing 55m long, with the advantage of live performance and music and projections.”
- 'The Head and the Load' is at the Joburg Theatre from April 21 to May 6. For more information, visit theheadandtheload.com. Tickets can be booked at joburgtheatre.com and webtickets.com
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