Explore William Kentridge’s remarkable performance piece, The Head & The Load, and discover how music, dance, writing, and fine art are combined to tell the haunting story of Africans during WWI

For over thirty years, William Kentridge has been combining fine arts, performance, theatre, and opera to create dreamlike, political, and humanist works. His installation, films, and drawings often deal with the political situation in South Africa, apartheid, and the consequences of colonialism. This book gives an in-depth examination of his performance piece The Head & The Load, which explores the role of Africa during World War I. Throughout the war, more than one million Africans carried provisions and military equipment in hazardous conditions for British, French, and German troops at minimal or no pay.

William Kentridge tells the story of these African porters who ensured the success of the victors, but remain in the shadows. This history, rarely studied today, unfolds in a staged tableau combining music, dance, acting, screenings, and mechanized sculptures. The book includes photos and text from the performance, essays, and artworks created specifically by Kentridge to complement the play. Accompanied by an international cast of singers, actors, and dancers, and with music composed by Philip Miller, The Head & The Load is a powerful and multifaceted work that reconsiders colonial history and its repercussions in today’s world.

About the Author:

William Kentridge is a South African artist internationally renowned for his prints, drawings, and animated films. His artworks are in many collections, including Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His spectacle-performances, including 'The Head & the Load', have been shown at the Festival d Avignon (2012), the thirteenth documenta in Kassel, and MassMOCA, among other prestigious festivals and venues.

The South African artist William Kentridge Hon RA was born in Johannesburg in 1955 and lives and works there to this day. He is internationally renowned for the expressionism of his work in numerous media, among them charcoal, printmaking, sculpture and film, as well as his acclaimed theatrical and operatic productions. As elusive as it is allusive, Kentridge’s art is shaped by apartheid and grounded in the politics of the post-apartheid era, and in science, literature and history, while always maintaining space for contradiction and uncertainty.

In a brilliant exposition of Kentridge’s output, Stephen Clingman, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, undertakes a series of enquiries, of walks around the artist and his practice, through the various layers and linkages, crossings and connections of his art. As he proceeds, he considers Kentridge’s themes, explores them and proceeds by association to others. Along the way, overlaps, thought collages, allusions and assemblages come together to create a connective, dimensional way of thinking inspired by Kentridge’s own habits of creation.

About the Author:

Stephen Clingman is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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