William Kentridge’s The Head & The Load, finally comes home

First performed at the Tate Modern in London in 2018, followed by sold-out runs in New York, Amsterdam and Germany, William Kentridge’s large-scale multimedia theatre work The Head & The Load, is at last being seen for the first time on the African continent at the Joburg Theatre.

The delay in bringing the production to Kentridge’s hometown was partly due to Covid-19 lockdowns, but also difficulty in staging a production that requires an enormous amount of theatre real estate to perform. An incredibly inventive restructuring of the backstage area at the Nelson Mandela Theatre in Braamfontein sees a purpose-built stage stretching over 50 metres, with a backstage seating configuration for approximately 500 audience members. The wings and backstage of the reconfigured theatre become a site-specific performance space large enough to accommodate this monumental work, which, in keeping with many of Kentridge’s productions, takes on an epic scale.

The title of the work derives from a Ghanaian proverb, ‘The head and the load are the troubles of the neck’. The title features as one of the fragmented texts projected across Kentridge’s characteristic stop-motion animated backdrops, themselves an integral layer of meaning to what is an incredibly dense and moving production. The focus of the production is on the colonial world’s press-ganging of millions of African porters and carriers, who were denied arms and effective military training, into shunting equipment and arms across the battlefields of the conflict in the First World War. Amazingly, this included carrying a dismantled warship in an echo of the demented opera-loving rubber baron of Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo.  The largely suppressed nature of this shameful history is remarked on by Kentridge himself: “The Head & The Load is about Africa and Africans in the First World War, that is to say about all the contradictions and paradoxes of colonialism that were heated and compressed by circumstances of the war. It is about historical incomprehension (and inaudibility and invisibility). The colonial logic towards the black participants could be summed up by the phrase coined at the time, ‘Lest their actions merit recognition, their deeds must not be recorded.’ The Head & The Load aims to recognise and record.”

The Head & The Load sees Kentridge working once more with long-time collaborator, composer Philip Miller, as well as co-composer and music director Thuthuka Sibisi and choreographer and principal dancer Gregory Maqoma from Vuyani Dance Company.

The production is staged as a huge palimpsest — in three layers of stage direction we have actors who perform as narrators of the ostensible script, but who also act out the frequent breakdown of linguistic meaning. Behind them is a constant procession — often illuminated by shadow play projections which ask questions of the depth-perception of the audience — comprising the porters themselves and as projections, carrying everything from rolls of barbed wire to the head of Sol Plaatje. Their projected burdens are all exquisite Kentridge carvings, which when back projected make visual sense. The backdrop itself forms the final layer of the palimpsests, projecting drawn animations comprising fragments of texts, pages from books of birds and, most poignantly, ledgers documenting the many thousands of African dead, mostly from avoidable disease and mistreatment.

The processional nature of the staging and the subject matter enables Kentridge to punctuate the movement across the vast stage with typically sculptural set pieces — guard towers, packing crates that unfold to reveal the live band complete with upright piano and West African Kora — that at times themselves become processional. At one point performer Joanna Dudley is shunted across stage on an ornate gurney, transformed into a hellish, shrieking German officer.

Kentridge is often drawn in his work to the colonial consequences of the European avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. In this production he draws particularly on the breakdown of gesture and language evident in Dadaism, dramatised in poetry by the likes of Tristan Tzara, and designed to comment critically on the alienation and dehumanisation of contemporary industrial society at the time. These qualities are writ large as an amalgam and rapid decay of European and African languages in the script of the piece, and the dissolution of the back-projected texts to nonsense syllables. The incredibly affecting fragmentation of language in the piece presages the brutal mistreatment of the porters and carriers, as their semblance of military order collapses in hunger and disease. This is carried through to the evocative musical score (performed by singers and musicians from SA , Guinea, the US, Germany, the UK and Italy), which combines classical European composition with African folk and spiritual musics, and itself frequently breaks down into noise.

The poignancy and tragic nature of the work’s subject matter is wrapped in a dense fabric of these layers and visual and sonic meanings — a truly emotionally charged feast for the senses. As many people already have, see it more than once if you can. It’s a political and aesthetic triumph.

William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load

Joburg Theatre

Until May 6