William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load arrives in Oakland

By Elena Vasquez

William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load opens in Oakland on November 12. The Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts will host the West Coast premiere from November 12 through 15. It is the only East Bay venue large enough to hold the production.

The South African artist’s epic interdisciplinary work premiered in London in 2018. Its American premiere followed at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in December 2018. Cal Performances includes it in the “Illuminations: ‘Innocence & Experience’” initiative, which plans to present a Kentridge theater work each season for five years.

What does the production remember?

Kentridge draws on the stories of African soldiers in World War I. The work recounts the history of more than two million Africans who struggled, fought and, in many cases, died during the war. Its title comes from a Ghanaian proverb: “The head and the load are the troubles of the neck.”

The production continues Kentridge’s investigation of forgotten pasts, language, and artistic and political movements through performance. The work has been described as “dumbfounding, eviscerating, and beautiful.”

Nearly three dozen singers, dancers and musicians fill the stage, combining music, dance and speech with projections of hacked-up maps and haphazard delineations of the African continent. Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi composed the score, and Sibisi also conducts. Kentridge directs.

Kentridge, 71, said an early spectator told the company, “This is such a strong anti-war piece of theater.”

He said the label had never entered his workshops, yet “the same thing — the impossibility of remembering — is not a term that we’d ever used while working on it, but it may well be about that.” He also said: “What the piece is about is largely made by the people watching it.”

The production treats remembrance as an unresolved act, not a settled verdict.

Where did the work begin?

Kentridge said the [180-foot] stage of the Park Avenue Armory provided the starting point. “The starting point was simply the [180-foot] stage of the Park Avenue Armory, and the fact of it being an armory suggested a military theme,” he explained. “Only after that, did I remember things I'd read as an undergraduate about Africa in the First World War.” The armory’s width, he said, allowed a processional form.

He then turned to oral history archives. He said “archives [also] protect the knowledge from being seen,” and called their guardians “extremely fierce, three-headed dogs.” He identified another kind of ignorance, one “deliberately made by the powers that be at the time of the history.”

As evidence, Kentridge noted that no Africans took part in the 1919 victory parade at the war’s end. England has many memorials to local inhabitants killed in the war. For The Head & the Load, Kentridge said, “we are doing it as if there was a record of peoples’ names.”

Kentridge links the archive’s concealed knowledge to the stage’s missing bodies.

What does Gregory Maqoma contribute?

Choreographer Gregory Maqoma, born in Soweto in 1973, founded Vuyani Dance Theater in 1999. He had worked with Kentridge before. Maqoma created the movement for The Head & the Load and danced in the Armory production and the work’s 2023 South African premiere in Johannesburg.

“Kentridge’s process is very collaborative,” Maqoma said. “We developed the material over time, and it wasn’t like we get into the studio and rehearse. Every department is given the opportunity to contribute on a larger scale of the project.” He created movement that addressed the work’s themes and accounted for its unconventional staging with large projections.

Maqoma saw every performer as a dancer whose body bears the work’s weight. “The first thing that fills that weight,” he said, “is the body. I treat it as an archive.” Bodies onstage play their own trauma, he said, as performers fall, recover and survive.

Maqoma argued that questions of colonialism, historical accountability, displacement and violence had become more urgent, and that dancers had to answer them through their own bodies. Dancing every night required truth in every moment, he said; he also carried the wounded man across the stage and helped keep the commands. The floor bore machinery, he recalled, but also “wounded bodies” and “broken spirits.”

Maqoma makes choreography serve as an archive of burden and survival.

How do music and language work?

The score mixes traditional African songs with passages from World War I-era European music by Erik Satie, Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg. European strings and brass fill the space, but Kentridge wanted them to sound unfamiliar.

He made the machine-gun rattle by tapping a bow on a double bass and the siren with a voice rather than an instrument. For artillery, he drew on a woman’s association sending many harmonicas to troops, then used them to suggest bombardment.

The work uses eight languages, including English, French, German and Zulu. It also includes Swazi, Swahili, sections of Dada and non-languages. Some passages translate Swazi or Swahili into English for audiences assumed to speak no African languages, while others render English into Zulu or Swazi for imagined native speakers. Kentridge said this tangle recreates “the European ignorance and disinterest in anything Africans at the time were saying, or might have thought.”

Maqoma said a dancer gives commands through a whistle, a role he once performed. Boots create stomping rhythms. The scene draws on men returning from war and entering a procession with their own dance. Maqoma called it “not a celebration, but a reminder of the trauma that the body has gone through.”

Music and speech make historical exclusion audible as well as visible.

What does the 180-foot stage ask of viewers?

The stage measures 180 feet, so no spectator can take it in at once. Viewers shift between nearby performers, distant action and Kentridge’s projected maps, and their brains must choose between listening to the words and watching the screen. Kentridge said the production makes audiences “put together meaning from disparate fragments,” a process “embodied in the production itself.”

He described the encounter as “a mixture of what the production throws towards you and what associations [you] lay on top of the production as it emerges through your eyes and tears.”

Cal Performances’ five-year commitment will bring further Kentridge theater work after this opening. The Head & the Load asks whether a fractured stage can make a historical absence impossible to ignore.