Pulled From the Shadows: William Kentridge's African Dance of Death

Pulled From the Shadows William Kentridge’s African Dance of Death Ann McCoy

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n what may be his most haunting production to date, The Head & the Load, performed at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, December 4–15, 2018, William Kentridge has created a living panorama commemorating the one million Africans who died on their continent as cogs in the military machinery of the First World War’s battling empires. They died as “counted not named” masses, without rank, without tributes, and without voices—for kings and countries (Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany) that were not their own. Commenting on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, one of the African narrators laments, “Even if I could persuade myself that Franz Josef is dead, I could never persuade myself he was ever alive.” If only they could have fought instead for their own leaders, like the king of the Ashante, imprisoned by the British for decades. This is the darkest side of colonialism, foretold by atrocities like King Leopold II’s ten million mutilated Congolese dead. Regarded as sub-human, and denigrated with monikers like wogs, their lives were spent in hunger, fatigue, and disease, unmarked by anonymity in death, on a vast continent shown in the performance through projections of old maps.

In The Head & the Load, the African soldiers in this panoramic dance of death are given their lost voices, sometimes in African tongues like isiZulu, Swahili, and isiXhosa, and occluded histories are restored. Narrating in multiple African and European roles and languages, the actors Mncedisi Shabangu, Luc De Wit, Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Hamilton Dlamini provide a through-line. This is a moving complex and multilayered performance combining projection, drawing, dance, and music.

When we think of artists reacting to the senseless trauma of the Great War, the Dadaists who escaped to neutral Switzerland and the Café Voltaire come to mind.

Dada traveled, and later participants from France and the Berlin anti-war group entered the mix. This production mines the Dada artists’ expressions of nihilism © 2019 Performing Arts Journal, Inc.

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and disgust at the futility of war. Act 1 begins with three sections: Manifestos, Morsecode/Swahili Phrasebook, and Ursonate. Manifestos includes the sound poetry of Hugo Ball and Ursonate, Kurt Schwitters’s 1932 sound poem (performed

by Kentridge as part of last year’s Performa). There were several Dada manifestos written originally: Hugo Ball stated in his that Dada came from the dictionary— in French it meant “hobby horse,” in German “good-bye” or “get off my back.”

The title The Head & the Load comes from a Ghanaian proverb: “The head and the load are the troubles of the neck.” If only the Africans could have gotten the white man’s burdens “off their backs.” Act 1’s three final sections (Orders & Commands, Recruiting, and Procession to War) build on the Dada sound poems. The staccato of Morsecode/Swahili Phrasebook and the barking orders of a French commandant (played by De Wit) lead the charge into chaos toward death. Projections behind the narrators hark back to some of the period’s theatre projections—full-stage height shadow silhouettes—used by Erwin Piscator in the twenties.

Conceived and directed by Kentridge, a South African artist, The Head & the Load is a collaborative ensemble piece. The production began development in a workshop in Johannesburg where the different participants worked on vignettes, musical innovations, and theatrical moments in bits and pieces that were later woven together into a whole. As Kentridge writes in the program: The test is really to find an approach that is not analytic dissection of a historical moment, but which doesn’t avoid the questions of history.

Can one find the truth in the fragmented and incomplete? Can one think about history as collage rather than narrative?

From my point of view, Ballet Mécanique (1923–24), the Dadaist and post-Cubist non-narrative film, provided a template for some of the collaged projections. In the production, isolated images and sequences are combined into a non-linear and non-narrative whole, with projections made by the designer Catherine Meyburgh and a collaborative team. Using Kentridge’s drawings, Meyburgh designed and filmed the live elements, which were then composited and edited in collaboration with Žana Marovic ; and Janus Fouché. Fernand Léger, who conceived Ballet Mécanique, nearly died from mustard gas in the trenches, and his film has its origins in his war experiences. Like Ballet Mécanique, images, performance nuggets, and disparate elements are cobbled together, and there is no one protagonist to take us through the action.

Perhaps its most striking projection series, Paradoxes, in Act 2, consists of Cubist-inspired geometric shapes, with the faces of traumatized and wounded 2  PAJ 122

Africans peering through angular cutouts to the score of “God Save the King.”

The flapper with bowed lips who peeps through the mostly triangular geometry, in Ballet Mécanique, is replaced here by the heart-wrenching and arresting stares of African soldiers. We identify with the traumatized men behind the shapes, broken apart like shattered glass. Žana Marovic ; and Duško Marovic ; found both old equipment and made new cinematographic devices to build this extraordinary sequence for the scene’s Dadaist kaleidoscope. A typed insert strip on one of the projected charts reads, “Darkness has eaten her own child.” Empires will also be broken apart, as humanity peers from the rubble at a changed world.

The current war-ravaged refugee crisis makes these images resonate powerfully.

In another projection sequence, also seen in Ballet Mécanique, isolated Russian Constructivist-style minimal shapes such as solid squares, circles, and triangles (here placed over newsprint) fill the cyclorama.

The Dadaists Francis Pacabia, Kurt Schwitters, and Marcel Duchamp, and the Russian Constructivists Lyubov Popova and Aleksandr Rodchenko, used machine parts to represent the emerging industrialized world. In The Head & the Load projections, electric fans, canons, and machine parts from this first mechanized war also function as performers. A movable staircase version of Vladimir Tatlin’s Tower, transporting the dancer Sipho Seroto in a gas mask, moves a Constructivist vantage point onto the African continent. De Wit’s mad French Commandant and Joanna Dudley’s double eagle-helmeted Kaiser will also roll across the stage on this tower-ladder. Thousands of African “carriers” died transporting a ship, as well as canons and other military hardware, overland from Cape Town to Lake Tanganyika. When train lines ended and ox carts could no longer function, they carried the ship on their backs. In the projections, we see an assortment of cargo—canons, gramophones, a great ship—forming the African soldiers’ burden.

They are cogs in the machinery of war and are also ground into oblivion by it.

At a public panel during the Armory run, Kentridge, co-composer Thuthuka Sibisi, and composer Philip Miller discussed how their 2016 Triumphs and Laments, created along the banks of the Tiber in Rome, was an operatic and formulaic breakthrough that led to the creation of The Head & the Load. A long stage, nearly the full length of the Armory, replaces the 600-yard processional expanse on the Tiber. Triumphs and Laments took place in front of a long frieze of eighty images drawn by the artist from the history of Rome. Images over twenty-feet high were placed as templates on theatre netting, hung over the Tiber embankment walls, and workers then power washed the existing soot from around the templates.

Two groups of musicians, led by Sibisi and Miller, along with puppet bearers, formed processional lines from the opposite ends of the Tiber and crossed in the middle. Rows of large lights were fastened at the river’s edge. During rehearsals Roman citizens ran close to the lamps, creating much larger shadow figures McCOY / Pulled from the Shadows  3

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Photos on facing pages: William Kentridge, The Head & The Load at Park Avenue Armory. Photos: Stephanie Berger.

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over the smaller uniform row of shadows of the actors’ procession. This double layering of shadows in different sizes is replicated in the Armory production.

When we think of gargantuan looming shadows, the long shadow of Harry Lime falling from a doorway in the Carol Reed film The Third Man (1949) comes to mind. Looming shadows, often appearing today in dance performances, are used with great psychological impact in this piece. At the Armory, performers are plucked from the group and their illuminated faces are flanked by their giant looming shadows that make their histories larger than life. Sometimes this is done as the actors move closer to one of the three Panasonic projection units mounted at the apron of the stage; at other times, this effect has been staged, pre-shot, and imposed over the projections. The result is the interaction of the shadows with the projections, and the pre-shot matching shadow sequences, as well as the movement of the performers and staging, created by the brilliant dramaturgy of Catherine Meyburgh (a twenty-year Kentridge collaborator.) What makes this form of shadow play so poignant here is how the shift of scale enlarges the narrative of the individual players. Segments from the dance performance created by the ensemble and choreographer Gregory Maqoma are memorable elements in this collage. A soldier attempting to hold a wounded comrade in military posture in Act 3, Running & Falling, plays out the link between tenderness and violence, writ large in their twenty-foot high shadows. Finally, unable to stand, he collapses in death.

Beginning with the drawing Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass (1990), Kentridge has been interested in the idea of the procession. Another charcoal drawing, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989), shows a crowd of black Africans pouring from a street. Beginning with the circular Overland (1999), projected onto the ceiling of the Amsterdam Civic Hall, Kentridge has used processional projections of black South Africans in many of his films and installations, such as The Refusal of Time (2012), created for dOCUMENTA 13 and later shown at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and in the multimedia chamber opera Refuse the Hour, staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival in 2015. A pivotal long processional piece on eight screens, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), was exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery, originating at the LUMA Foundation in Switzerland. This long multiple-screen projection featured a procession of African workers, forming a touchstone to the projected backdrop at the Armory. In The Head & the Load, processions of live actors with shadow puppets, shadow play from lamps at the edge of the stage are added, and images matching the actions of the actors on stage are also superimposed over the projections. The use of old fixed lenses in filming the live footage by the cinematographer Duško Marovic ; enhanced the periodization of the images.

These effects have been taken to new heights in this production.

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In his First Norton Lecture, Drawing Lesson One: In Praise of Shadows (Harvard University, 2012), Kentridge said: It is in the very limitation and leanness of shadows that we learn, in the gaps, in the leaps to complete an image, that we perform a generative act of constructing the shape [. . .] The very leanness of the illusion pushes us to complete the recognition—and this prompts an awareness of the activity itself, recognizing in this activity our agency in seeing, and our agency in apprehending the world.

Kentridge relates an unfolding history in a collage of images and sounds. The audience itself puts the pieces together—the impact comes from what’s left out, his gaps. Like his shadow play, the viewer completes the image. The shadow figures used by Kentridge inhabit a liminal realm, the in-between world, which bridges the unconscious and the waking dream. We meet the players from both above and below the threshold of consciousness. To reduce them to political commentary robs them of their psychic complexity. This is where many positivist and Marxist commentaries on his work are lacking. This occluded history, seen here as a shadow procession resembling a dance of death, is what Jung called the collective shadow, the shameful histories that nations cast off, project onto others, or keep hidden in the unconscious depths.

In the performance, many images and devices have their source in older Kentridge productions and artworks. Performers wear huge sculptural constructions resembling elephant ears and transport megaphones, and they ride on moving platforms. Kentridge has used megaphones, typewriters, and moving platforms in operatic productions, such as Refuse the Hour and The Magic Flute. In an opening sequence of The Head & the Load, The Knights orchestra, conducted by Thuthuka Sibisi, comes on stage in a hinged box not unlike those set designer Sabine Theunissen (who worked on both productions) used in The Nose, the Dmitri Shostakovich opera directed by Kentridge at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010. Here Theunissen co-ordinated the interaction of the props with the projections. Miller and Sibisi also collaborated on the score, played by the bands that formed the procession from different ends of the Tiber in Triumphs and Laments.

The combination of European and African instruments and sounds amplifies the complexity of the clash of civilizations in the tragedy played out on stage.

In one soulful moment, N’Faly Kouyate sang while he accompanied himself on the kora string instrument.

Kentridge is a master draftsman, perhaps the most accomplished artist working with projection today. In his drawings, he shows tenderness transmogrifying into violence, sorrow into pity, and life into death. In Act 2, War, the artist’s delicate McCOY / Pulled from the Shadows  7

drawings of birds are blown apart in the projections, behind the heartbreaking duet of Erik Satie’s “Je te veux,” sung by soprano Ana Masina, along with Joanna Dudley. Dudley, who sang Berlioz backwards through a megaphone in Refuse the Hour, is seen here as a deranged Valkyrie in her double eagle helmet. Her twisting shadow forms one of the most intriguing looming projections. The amazing vocal range of the two women, known to New York audiences for their work in Refuse the Hour, brings the African and European musical traditions together with an originality rarely heard.

In Act 2, the artist’s drawings of the African dead and hanged men are among the saddest. Archival photographs of rows of soldiers are manipulated to great effect

by Meyburgh. Images of African troops in fez and uniforms multiply to fill the cyclorama, forming endless columns. Kentridge’s large drawings of mosquitos, tsetse flies, warrior ants, and wild bees show the giant role of these tiny killers.

This theme reappears in Act 3, Advanced Arithmetics. Ledger pages listing the troops and the horrors from which they expired—insects, disease, wounds—are particularly heart-rending.

A jarring sequence of 1960s independence archive photographs at the end of the production shows a rogues’ gallery of African dictators: Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire/Congo), Patrice Lumumba (Zaire/Congo), Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana). In the footage, black men in uniform beat their fellow countrymen. This is a sad reminder that much of postcolonial Africa has adopted the trappings and tyrannical practices of their former masters, and the tragic colonial history is still being played out across the continent.

The collaborative ensemble William Kentridge has assembled seems to ascend to greater heights with each production. Catherine Meyburgh has combined these images in a seamless way that is remarkable—the filmed sequences are matched with the looming shadows and movements of the performers with an ever-greater mastery. When Kentridge’s theatrical works are rooted in his African homeland, they are perhaps his best. He shows the history of Africa from multiple perspectives. His collaborators, a wealth of black African musicians, singers, and dancers, also include an assortment of the descendants of colonizers. It will be interesting to see if his upcoming Metropolitan Opera production of Wozzeck, a military horror story from the same period, builds on this performance.

ANN McCOY is an artist, art historian, art critic, and occasional theatre designer. She lectures on art history, mythology, and the history of projection in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama.

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