The Sea is History

With The Sea is History, Betty Tchomanga continues her work on the memories of the African diaspora. After centuries of violence, how can one write one’s own history? After such dispossession, how can the body be reclaimed?

The Atlantic Ocean connects Europe, Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean as much as it separates them. After Leçons de Ténèbres and its metaphor of the ship-world, Betty Tchomanga sets sail once again, expanding the ways Afro-diasporic identities can be imagined and represented. The choreographer draws on writer Saidiya Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation”: an act of reconstruction and invention at the edge of archives and memory. Set to the incantatory rhythm of a hybrid musical score, a group of Afrodescendant dancers search within their own bodies for what has survived colonial history, despite violence and attempts at erasure. The images they bring forth are abstract, subterranean and powerful. Structured around the motif of flight, the choreography turns movement into a subversive and political gesture. On stage, the machinery of the theater itself becomes the set, referencing its historical ties to the ship. Colonization shaped modernity, and its legacy continues to demand scrutiny. Through an intricate play of lines and planes, The Sea is History keeps unsettling our perspectives.