South African artist William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load brings dance, projection, speech, song, shadow play, costume, and music together to confront the largely untold history of more than two million Africans who labored, fought, and died during the First World War. The title comes from the Ghanaian proverb “The head and the load are the troubles of the neck,” extending Kentridge’s investigation of history, language, and political and artistic movements.

Kentridge conceived and directs the work, with music by Philip Miller, choreography by Gregory Maqoma, and music direction and additional composition by Thuthuka Sibisi. Staged on a vast scale, the production combines multilingual texts by anticolonial writers and Dada poets with a score that interweaves traditional African songs and references to wartime European music by Satie, Hindemith, and Schoenberg.

Developed with performers and collaborators across disciplines, the work transforms archival absence into a layered historical pageant about colonialism, memory, sacrifice, and whose stories survive.