William Kentridge’s The Head & The Load premieres in Oakland

African laborers conscripted during World War I take center stage in William Kentridge’s sprawling 90-minute multidisciplinary performance The Head & the Load, which makes its West Coast premiere on Nov. 12-15 at Oakland’s Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts, news.berkeley.edu reported.

Bringing the Forgotten Archive to the Oakland Stage

European battlefields usually dominate accounts of World War I, pushing colonial contributions to the margins. More than two million Africans were conscripted by European forces, frequently through force or coercion. While some fought in colonial armies, most served as porters hauling food, ammunition, and equipment because tsetse flies and rough terrain made pack animals impractical during the East African campaign. Their essential labor went largely unrecorded.

Kentridge’s production addresses that historical suppression through a sensory procession of song, dance, projected imagery, and shadow play. Unfolding in European and African languages, the 90-minute work weaves texts by anticolonial writers and Dada poets with fragments of the colonial archive, including maps, film clips, and lists of the dead.

Around 15 years ago at a retrospective, UC Berkeley professor of French and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry Debarati Sanyal first came across Kentridge’s creations, later inspecting charcoal sketches for the initiative in 2018 at the creator’s Johannesburg studio. Sanyal notes that the performance puts the archive itself on stage rather than claiming to speak for the dead porters.

“The projections show an arithmetic of extraction and disposable life, but the living, moving, singing and shaking bodies on stage resist being reduced to statistics,” Sanyal said.

Connecting Colonial Eras to Contemporary Borders

The title of the production derives from a Ghanaian proverb: “The head and the load are the troubles of the neck.” Sanyal points out that colonial and imperial authorities actively minimized or erased colonial soldiers from official histories and public memory, noting how French military authorities removed West African conscripts who made up about two-thirds of the Free French forces from Paris-bound troops during the liberation of Paris.

Prior to the Oakland shows, Kentridge and Sanyal will engage in a pre-performance dialogue on Nov. 13 as part of Cal Performances’ public-programming series Illuminations, which carries the 2026-27 theme “Innocence and Experience.” Investigating how Europe’s imperial past still shapes modern racialized migrant policies and border frameworks is a core focus of Sanyal’s academic work, which encompasses her 2025 text Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges.

Performances run through Nov. 15 at the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts in Oakland, marking the launch of a five-year Cal Performances initiative to present an interdisciplinary work by Kentridge each season.

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