Tag Archives: wade thompson drill hall

AFTERWARDSNESS

AFTERWARDSNESS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
May 19-26, $45 (limited tickets go on sale April 1)
www.armoryonpark.org

I’ve been tentative about the return of live, indoor music, dance, and theater, wondering how comfortable I would feel in an enclosed area with other audience members and onstage performers. Many of my colleagues who cover the arts are steadfastly against going to shows right now as things open up, while others have been having a ball going to the movies and eating inside. But when I received my invitation to see Afterwardsness at the Park Avenue Armory on March 24, I surprised myself with how much immediate glee I felt, how instantly exhilarated I was to finally, at last, see a show, in the same space with actual human beings. But my excitement was broken when it was announced that several members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company had tested positive for Covid-19 and the show, which had sold out quickly, had to be postponed. But now it’s back as part of the Armory’s Social Distance Hall season, running May 19 to 26; original ticket holders will get first dibs, with remaining tickets going on sale to the general public April 1. “Creating new, body-based work at a time when physical proximity is discouraged is no small feat,” Jones said in a statement. “However, as is often the case when artists are forced to push through limitations, this is when things get really good. Having the drill hall, this grand and glorious space to create and dance in, was quite liberating. The armory is a space like no other in New York City—and if it’s like no other in New York City, then it’s pretty unique in the world.”

The sixty-five minute show, named for Freud’s concept of “a mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events,” will take place in the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where one hundred audience members will be seated in chairs nine to twelve feet apart in all directions as the action unfolds around them. The hall has been updated with air-refreshing methods that exceed CDC and ASHRAE standards; there will be onsite testing and strict masking and social distancing policies. The work explores the isolation felt during the pandemic as well as the impact of the George Floyd protests and BLM movement. The choreography is by Tony winner Jones, with a new vocal composition by Holland Andrews, whose Museum of Calm recently streamed through the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Musical director Pauline Kim Harris will perform the violin solo “8:46” in tribute to Floyd, and there will also be new compositions by company members Vinson Fraley Jr. and Chanel Howard as well as excerpts from Olivier Messaien’s 1941 chamber piece Quartet for the End of Time, written while he was a POW in a German prison. The lighting is by Brian H. Scott, with sound by Mark Grey. The inaugural program at the armory is now Social! The Social Distance Dance Club, a collaboration between Steven Hoggett, Christine Jones, and David Byrne that runs April 9-22 and gives each audience member their own spotlight in which to move to choreography by Yasmine Lee.

JUDGMENT DAY

Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz (Luke Kirby) salutes as train passes by in Judgment Day (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Monday – Saturday through January 10, $55-$195
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

In his 1936–37 work Judgment Day, Austro-Hungarian novelist and playwright Ödön von Horváth warns of the rise of fascism in Germany, comparing it to a speeding train approaching a station that has no idea it’s coming. That’s the central motif in Richard Jones’s admirable if uneven new production, adapted by Christopher Shinn, that opened today at Park Ave. Armory for a run through January 10. Jones, who presented a fierce version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape at the armory in 2017, once again makes unique use of the building’s vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall; Paul Steinberg’s set features oversized, flat, painted plywood trees around the back, sides, and corners and two giant, movable blocks of unpainted wood, like a child’s toys, one in the shape of an arch, the other flat and angled like a stray wall from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Mimi Jordan Sherin’s stark lighting creates distinct reflections on the shiny black floor, like the characters’ souls on display.

It’s the 1930s, and a lumberjack (Andy Murray), the gossipy Frau Leimgruber (Harriet Harris), and a traveling salesman (Jason O’Connell) are waiting for a local train. Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz (Luke Kirby) emerges only to ring the signal bell, standing at attention and saluting as the express roars by, thrillingly portrayed by Drew Levy’s immersive sound design and the actors’ dramatic reactions. After seeing off her fiancé, butcher Ferdinand (Alex Breaux), ingénue Anna (Susannah Perkins) teases the straitlaced Hudetz as his shrewish wife, Frau Hudetz (Alyssa Bresnahan), watches from above. Anna makes an unexpected and unwelcome move, beginning a chain of events that leads to the death of eighteen people, including a track worker (O’Connell) and train driver Pokorny (Maurice Jones) but leaving a witness, stoker Herr Kohut (George Merrick).

Paul Steinberg’s set features two large movable wooden structures (photo by Stephanie Berger)

A policeman (Charles Brice) and detective (Joe Wegner) arrive to find out what happened, but falsehood, deception, and long-simmering desires and grievances soon boil over. “I’m telling the truth! I swear to everything!” Frau Hudetz argues. Frau Hudetz’s brother, pharmacist Alfons (Henry Stram), becomes an outcast even after he disowns his sister. “Everything is connected,” he insists, but no one is listening to him. Guilt and mob mentality tear at the fabric of this small community, resulting in yet more death and destruction. “People are so fickle,” waitress Leni (Jeena Yi) says. “Who gives a shit about people,” Hudetz responds.

Paul Steinberg’s set steals the show in new production at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Jones’s staging often makes the characters look like little figures in a dollhouse, dwarfed by the two wooden blocks, as if they’re being manipulated by unseen forces. In his sharp uniform (the costumes are by Antony McDonald) and direct speech, Hudetz resembles a Nazi. “I was always a diligent official!” he says over and over, reminiscent of what would later become the Third Reich excuse “I was only following orders.” Judgment Day is a biting indictment of prewar German morality, written by Horváth after he had fled Germany and shortly before he died in Paris when struck by a tree branch during a thunderstorm at the age of thirty-six. The parable can’t quite carry the weight of the production through its ninety minutes, drifting between Expressionism and realism while evoking the style of Bertolt Brecht and a streamlined Robert Wilson, sometimes getting stuck in between. But there are numerous breathtaking moments as Jones (Into the Woods, The Trojans), Shinn (Dying City, Where Do We Live), and Horváth (Tales from the Vienna Woods, Youth without God) take aim at the spread of fascism and groupthink, in the 1930s and now.

HITO STEYERL: DRILL

Drill is centerpiece of extensive Hito Steyerl exhibition at Park Avenue Armory (photo by James Ewing)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Through July 21, $20
armoryonpark.org

“Spare no expense to make war beautiful,” historian Anna Duensing says in Drill, referring to military history. Drill, a three-channel, twenty-one-minute video, is the centerpiece of German artist Hito Steyerl’s site-specific, wide-ranging multimedia installation of the same name at Park Ave. Armory, where it continues through July 21. Projected on both sides of three large screens in the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Steyerl’s film delves into the history of the armory, from its time as the headquarters of the Seventh Regiment of the National Guard, known as a silk-stocking regiment, to its exclusive use by the wealthy and its direct relationship to the founding of the National Rifle Association. Steyerl goes to the armory basement, formerly a shooting range, where bullet holes can still be seen in the walls; includes clips of speeches by antigun activists at a Washington, DC, rally; and follows the Yale University Precision Marching Band as it makes its way through the drill hall, playing music by Jules Laplace based on data sonification from casualty statistics of AR-15 violence and mass shootings, with choreography by Thomas C. Duffy. Among the participants are Nurah Abdulhaqq of National Die-In, Kareem Nelson of Wheelchairs Against Guns, retired school principal and proud gun owner Judith Pearson, and gun violence prevention activist Abbey Clements. A series of interconnected bulbs on the floor occasionally light up in white and red, linking the viewer to what is happening onscreen.

In her 2013 e-flux article “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” Steyerl wrote, “Data, sounds, and images are now routinely transitioning beyond screens into a different state of matter. They surpass the boundaries of data channels and manifest materially. They incarnate as riots or products, as lens flares, high-rises, or pixelated tanks. Images become unplugged and unhinged and start crowding off-screen space. They invade cities, transforming spaces into sites, and reality into realty. They materialize as junkspace, military invasion, and botched plastic surgery. They spread through and beyond networks, they contract and expand, they stall and stumble, they vie, they vile, they wow and woo.” That statement relates to several of the other works in the show, spread throughout the armory’s period rooms and hallway.

Sandbags offer an uncomfortable place to sit while watching Hito Steyerl’s videos Duty Free Art and Is the Museum a Battlefield? (photo by James Ewing)

In the Parlor, Is the Museum a Battlefield? is an illustrated lecture projected on two screens and a box of white sand as Steyerl investigates the fascinating relationship between art museums and war, starting with a bullet that killed a friend of hers. The audience sits on sandbags, immersed in the narrative that involves the Louvre, the Hermitage, and other arts institutions. “Museums are of course battlefields. They have been throughout history,” she says. “They have been torture chambers, sites of war crimes, civil war, and also revolution.” Although the illustrated lecture was produced for the thirteenth Istanbul Biennial, it feels right at home at the armory, a building initially constructed for the military that now is an arts institution itself. That is followed by Duty Free Art, in which Steyerl delves into income inequality through art, business, and war via freeports, where collectors store their art holdings without having to pay taxes, impacting the global economy.

In the Veterans Room and Library, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, named for the five most-used English words in songs on the Billboard charts, features concrete and neon sculptures of those words along with video of product testing on robots, while Robots Today ties together narration from Muslim polymath Al-Jazari’s 1205 Automata with shots of a Kurdish city destroyed by the Turkish military in 2016.

ExtraSpaceCraft offers comfy chairs to watch the Iraqi National Observatory become the Autonomous Space Agency (photo by James Ewing)

Broken Windows is shown at both ends of the central hallway; one end depicts Chris Toepfer and other community activists painting canvases and placing them over broken windows in abandoned buildings in Camden, New Jersey, while at the other end researchers in London test the sound of breaking glass for artificial intelligence. The title of the video takes on added meaning here in New York City given the NYPD’s controversial use of broken windows policing, which believes that targeting smaller crimes will prevent bigger ones.

The show also includes The Tower in the Mary Divver Room and ExtraSpaceCraft in the Board of Officers Room, which are like watching virtual reality video games, while Prototype 1.0 and 1.1 in the Field and Staff Room is a pair of blue robots made of foam-and-aluminum, one standing, the other lying on the floor, as if they had come out of Hell Yeah We Fuck Die after undergoing brutal testing. And in the Colonels Reception Room, Freeplots offers hope for the future amid all the technological mayhem, a collaboration with El Catano Community Garden in East Harlem that consists of flowers blooming in wooden planters filled with horse-manure compost, turning the crates that store art in the freeports into something positive for everyone. The exhibition requires a significant investment of time and concentration; the works are complex, and the videos run more than two hours in total, but Steyerl has a lot to say that is worth paying attention to, even if some of the delivery is less inspiring than others. On July 20 at 3:00 and 5:00 ($10), there will be a performance lecture by Anton Vidokle, Adam Khalil, and Bayley Sweitzer, “The Dead Walk into a Bar,” which promises: “As a staff of identical ushers draws back layers of confusion and pain, the freshly resurrected gradually become aware of the reality of their corporeal reinsertion: perhaps the world of the living is not a world at all; to be alive in this place may merely be an exhibit.”

EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED AND WOULD HAPPEN

Heiner Goebbels explores the last hundred years of European history in Everything that happened and would happen (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
June 3-9, $40-$95
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

German composer and artist Heiner Goebbels constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs the last hundred years of European history in Everything that happened and would happen, making its American premiere at Park Ave. Armory through June 9. Reconfigured for the armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall — it was originally staged in a former railway depot in Manchester — the multimedia, polyphonic spectacle starts as soon as the doors open, so be sure to get there early. The audience sits in rising rafters on the west side of the hall, watching a team of dancers in black (Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzalez, Sandhya Daemgen, Antoine Effroy, Ismeni Espejel, Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Freddy Houndekindo, Tuan Ly, Thanh Nguyễn Duy, John Rowley, Annegret Schalke, Ildikó Tóth, Tyra Wigg) carry seemingly random objects onstage — long tubes, metallic seashells, a gold sun, large cloths that they hang from above — position them carefully, then remove them.

Various people read passages from Patrik Ouředník’s 2001 Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, a tragicomic, stream-of-consciousness look at the twentieth century, exploring war, racism, colonialism, collective memory, liberal democracy, the Holocaust, Barbie dolls, and more. Sentences are occasionally projected on hanging sheets designed with trees, maps, and architectural structures, in addition to unedited footage from Euronews’s No Comment, with no narration or context; the night we attended featured very recent live, often violent images from Syria, Colombia, and other nations. (The video design is by Rene Liebert.) In one corner smoke oozes out of a cave, creating a face. Rocks storm down in an avalanche. The dancers roll column-like plinths across the stage, pedestals without busts; later, one performer climbs on top of one and reads from Ouředník’s book.

Everything that happened and would happen has been reimagined for the Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The dissonant score, from John Cage’s Europeras 1&2, is played by Camille Émaille on percussion, Gianni Gebbia on saxophone, Cécile Lartigau on ondes Martenot, Nicolas Perrin on guitar and electronics, and Léo Maurel on several specially built, unusual instruments. (The props are from Goebbels’s 2012 production of Europeras 1&2.) Willi Bopp’s stunning sound design has music and words emerging from numerous speakers throughout the hall, as if a choreographed sonic dance. Goebbels is a master of deception; while you’re watching one element, others will sneak up on you, offering surprises galore, evoking life itself — and war, specifically, but without the immediate threat. A long, narrow beam becomes a mobile trench. Black monoliths creep up out of the darkness. At one point I felt as if Birnam Wood was stealthily approaching; another reminded me of George Washington crossing the Delaware (even if it’s not from the last century). The dancers and musicians improvise, furthering the anything-can-happen atmosphere.

Perhaps what’s most invigorating about the 135-minute-plus intermissionless show — Goebbels’s third project at the armory, following Stifter’s Dinge in 2009 and De Materie in 2016 — is that despite the serious topics that are broached, abstract and not, Goebbels leaves it up to us to interpret what we are experiencing; he gives us the building blocks from which we can form our own narrative. “Everything that happened and would happen doesn’t participate in all the attempts to have yet another opinion as to the meaning of what has happened; quite the opposite. Guided by a deep mistrust in the transmission of a one-directional message, I don’t even try,” Goebbels explains in his director’s note. “Everything that happened and would happen seeks to open up a space of images, words, and sounds generous enough to avoid the impression that somebody on stage is trying to tell you what to think. It is a space for imagination and reflection, in which the construction of sense is left for everyone to assemble.”

Words, images, movement, and sound come together in unique, contemplative ways in Heiner Goebbels’s return to the armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

It can be slow going, and several members of the audience did not make it to the end, which is too bad, because Everything that happened and would happen proves to be a provocative durational exploration of the past, present, and future fusing together, a multimedia barrage on the eyes and ears that demands our attention even as the mind wanders. Even when not much appears to be going on, something is, of course, mimicking life and the choices we make as we go about our day; Goebbels metaphorically hands us the controls and we watch and listen to what we want to, self-curating the presentation. Ouředník writes, “Historians said that historical memory was not part of history and memory was shifted from the historical to the psychological sphere, and this instituted a new mode of memory whereby it was no longer a question of memory of events but memory of memory.” On opening night, at the close of the show, Goebbels himself was helping the ushers steer the audience to the exits on the far side of the stage, forcing everyone to march along a battered landscape and take stock of where we are at this very moment in time, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. It’s a fitting finale to an adventurous evening of intoxicating, memorable theater.

HEINER GOEBBELS: EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED AND WOULD HAPPEN

everything that happens

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
June 3-9, $40-$95
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

In 2009, German composer and artist Heiner Goebbels brought Stifter’s Dinge to Park Avenue Armory, a work for five pianos, sans performers, an architectural, musical, kinetic collage with the voices of William S Burroughs, Malcolm X, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 2016, his multidisciplinary De Materie featured a lighted zeppelin and a flock of sheep. His latest spectacle to come to the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is Everything that happened and would happen, running June 3-9. Originally staged in a former railway station in Manchester, the 160-minute intermissionless piece, reconfigured for the armory, combines unedited footage from Euronews’s No Comment, music from John Cage’s “Europeras 1&2,” and text based on Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. “Heiner Goebbels is an artist who defies classification. Composer, visual artist, theatrical pioneer, philosopher, and poet of the stage, he has for decades created compelling productions using a wide variety of performers,” armory artistic director Pierre Audi said in a statement. “The Drill Hall thrives on art forms flirting with each other, teasing us, provoking us, challenging us. Goebbels is the ring master par excellence who offers us a production especially inspired by the armory space. The result is an immersive experience that leaves each of us, the spectators, with our own experience and interpretation.”

The work, which was co-commissioned by Park Avenue Armory, 14—18 Now, Artangel, and Ruhrtriennale and explores a century of world history, is conceived and directed by Goebbels, with lighting by Goebbels and John Brown, sound by Willi Bopp, and video by Rene Liebert, with five musicians (Camille Emaille, Gianni Gebbia, Cécile Lartigau, Léo Maurel, Nicolas Perrin) and twelve performers and dancers (Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzalez, Sandhya Daemgen, Antoine Effroy, Ismeni Espejel, Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Freddy Houndekindo, Tuan Ly, Thanh Nguyễn Duy, John Rowley, Annegret Schalke, Ildikó Tóth, Tyra Wigg). On June 6 at 5:30, Goebbels will take part in an artist talk with Gelsey Bell.

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY

Henry Lehman (Simon Russell Beale) is the first Lehman brother to arrive in America in epic play at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 20
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

The prospect of sitting through a nearly three-and-a-half-hour play about the history of Lehman Brothers performed by a mere three actors might not necessarily be your idea of fun, but the US premiere of Ben Power’s adaptation of Stefano Massini’s Italian original is an epic masterpiece, must-see theater at its finest. Running in the massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Ave. Armory through April 20 — advance tickets are sold out but a limited number of $45 rush tickets are available day of show — The Lehman Trilogy begins with a prologue in 2008 as a man packs boxes following the Black Thursday stock market crash on Es Devlin’s breathtaking set, a large, revolving transparent cube with several office-like rooms. Video designer Luke Halls projects geographic scenes onto the huge semicircle at the back of the stage and onto the floor around the cube, from the vast sea and plantation estates to cotton fields and the New York City skyline.

The first act, “Three Brothers,” quickly shifts to the past, to September 1844, with the arrival of twenty-one-year-old Henry Lehman (Simon Russell Beale) from his native Rimpar in Bavaria. He opens a small fabric store in Montgomery, Alabama, amid the plantations and is determined to live the American dream. “He left with an idea of America in his head / and got off the boat with America before him: / no longer in his mind but there in front of his eyes. / AMERICA. / Baruch HaShem,” Henry says about himself. Much of the play is related in poetic language spoken in the third person, interwoven with dialogue. Through it all, Candida Caldicot plays the piano just offstage, adding atmosphere and playful humor.

Henry (Simon Russell Beale), Emanuel (Ben Miles), and Mayer Lehman (Adam Godley) change the face of American capitalism in The Lehman Trilogy (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Henry is joined three years later by middle brother Emanuel (Ben Miles), who was twenty at the time, and then by nineteen-year-old Mayer Lehman (Adam Godley) in 1850; Henry is considered the head, Emanuel the arm, and Mayer the potato, an unequal partner sent to mediate any disputes between his older siblings. Henry has a brilliant mind for adapting to evolving market conditions, including inventing them in order to help the company flourish as it goes from selling fabrics to raw cotton, coffee, and coal to, ultimately, trading money itself once they move to New York City, setting up shop at 119 Liberty St. With each advance, they change their business sign, represented by writing the company’s new name on the glass wall. In the second act, “Fathers & Sons,” the next generation grows up and enters the organization: Emanuel’s son, Philip (Beale), and Mayer’s son, Herbert (Miles), who continue to expand the family’s holdings while getting further away from their heritage. “He was born in New York: / in his blood, not even a drop / of Germany or Alabama. / New Herbert. / Very new Herbert. / Son of New York, Herbert,” Mayer says. Act three, “The Immortal,” starts with a harrowing depiction of the suicides that came with the crash of 1929 as the more flashy Robert “Bobby” Lehman (Godley), Philip’s son, becomes the face of the company. Eventually, the firm runs out of Lehmans, instead being led by Pete Peterson (Beale) and Lewis Glucksman (Miles) as the 2008 mortgage crisis awaits.

Es Devlin’s set is another character in The Lehman Trilogy at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Power (Husbands and Sons, Medea) and Oscar-, Tony-, and Olivier Award–winning director Sam Mendes (The Ferryman, American Beauty) have streamlined Stefano Massini’s five-hour Italian original, which featured a much larger cast. Beale (Candide, Uncle Vanya), Miles (The Norman Conquests, Coupling), and Godley (Rain Man, Anything Goes) are a sight to behold, each onstage for nearly the entire play; they remain in Katrina Lindsay’s business-suit costumes, but it’s clear which of the many characters they are portraying at any given moment. Devlin’s cube is its own star, especially when, late in the show, it starts whipping around faster and faster, at speeds that will make you dizzy, never mind the three remarkable actors, who take it all in stride and as if they are one entity. The script doesn’t judge the Lehmans’ morality; it doesn’t mention that the Lehmans owned slaves in Alabama, and it avoids focusing on the ethical issues inherent in their rise to the heights of the financial world. “I don’t think I’m hated,” Bobby says, concerned about what his employees think of him. “No slave likes his master,” his wife, Ruth (Beale), says. “Am I the master?” Bobby asks.

The Lehman Trilogy also doesn’t turn the siblings into heroes or villains; each family member has his or her flaws and proclivities, and they become evident throughout the show, as does their genius when it comes to making money. It’s a riveting story of immigration and assimilation, with a particularly Jewish flavor as the Lehmans pave a path to fortune and wealth from a Bavarian shtetl to the cotton fields of the South and the golden streets of New York City. Henry touches the mezuzah and kisses his hand every time he enters and leaves his shop/office and often punctuates his desires by saying, “Baruch HaShem” (“Thank G-d”) — it’s as if his place of business is sacred ground, a holy temple — and the brothers sit shiva (a mourning ritual) whenever a family member passes. Although you know how it all ends in 2008, The Lehman Trilogy shines an absorbing light on just who the Lehman brothers were and how they made the most of their American dream.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE’S THE HEAD & THE LOAD

William Kentridge’s massive spectacle The Head & the Load continues at Park Avenue Armory through December 15 (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
December 4-15, $40-$90, 2:00/7:00/8:00
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org
www.theheadandtheload.com

In 2012, MoMA hosted “Five Themes,” a major, wide-ranging retrospective of the work of South African artist William Kentridge. Virtually everything Kentridge has done since then — the public procession Triumph and Laments: A Project for Rome, the multimedia chamber opera Refuse the Hour, adaptations of Berg’s Lulu and Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Met, “The Refusal of Time” installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the gallery exhibition “Second-Hand Reading” at Marian Goodman, and a performance of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate at Harlem Parish — has merely been a prelude to The Head & the Load, a massive multidisciplinary spectacle that could only be put on in New York City in the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Taking place on a stage nearly two hundred feet long, the presentation employs a jagged, abstract narrative to explore the fate of hundreds of thousands of black Africans forced into service by colonialist European countries, primarily Germany, France, Belgium, and Britain, as porters and carriers during World War I. Kentridge uses live music, choreographed movement, video projections, and dialogue in multiple languages to relate the tragic tale. A trio of military men (Hamilton Dlamini, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, and associate director Luc De Wit) speak in nonsense words from Ursonate. Ann Masina delivers gorgeous arias with objects on her head. Joanna Dudley, wearing an eagle on a Nazi helmet, is pushed across the stage on a ramshackle cart, pronouncing edicts. Sipho Seroto stands atop a tower, wearing an evil-looking gas mask. The Knights play in a surprise confined space. Mncedisi Shabangu, in a bright yellow jacket, serves as narrator, guiding us through the complex story. A procession of men and women parades across the length of the stage, many wearing or carrying stencil cutouts of human faces and animals that show up as silhouetted shadows on the back wall, mixing with previously photographed video.

Ann Masina sings as four men look on in The Head & the Load (photo by Stephanie Berger)

In a program note, Kentridge asks, “Can one find the truth in the fragmented and incomplete? Can one think about history as collage, rather than as narrative?” Commissioned by 14-18 NOW and the armory along with Ruhrtriennale and MASS MoCA as part of the centenary of the end of WWI, The Head & the Load is a thrilling eighty-five-minute cacophony of sound, images, and movement, a performance collage that reveals little-known facts about African involvement in the war. The title comes from the Ghanaian proverb “The head and the load are the troubles of the neck,” representing the physical and psychological burdens thrust onto Africans. The production is divided into three acts, “Manifestos,” “Paradox,” and “War,” with such scenes as “Morsecode / Swahili Phrasebook,” “Orders & Commands,” “Troubles of the Body,” “Playing Against History,” “Kaiser Waltz,” and “Coda & Deathlist.” Composers Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi’s score was inspired by Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Paul Hindemuthy, Arnold Schoenberg, and Fritz Kreisler, while Kentridge incorporates text, either spoken or projected onscreen, from Frantz Fanon, Tristan Tzara, Wilfred Owen, Aimé Césaire, the conference of Berlin, phrases from a handbook of military drills, Setswana proverbs from Sol Plaatje’s 1920 collection, and a letter from John Chilembwe.

The Head & the Load is highlighted by a multimedia procession across a two-hundred-foot-long stage (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The choreographer is Gregory Maqoma, with cinematography by Duško Marović, costumes by Greta Goiris, sets by Sabine Theunissen, lighting by Urs Schönebaum, and sound by Mark Grey, all coming together in exciting ways. Although Kentridge himself does not appear, his hands are evident throughout, particularly when cutting up maps and other documents on filmed segments, evoking the feel of the entire piece, which is really more of an experience than a show. When the audience enters the drill hall, they pass by several lights that project their shadows onto the back wall of the stage, a sly way of making everyone complicit in this colonialist world of war, ethnocentricity, and cultural suppression. It’s a critical message for the modern era, sent by an extraordinary artist and his marvelous team.