Battling Siki #3 – N. O. B.

Even if this is the stuff of which films and operas are made, the multimedia artist Jean Michel Bruyère, who lives in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and the Parisian composer, electric guitarist and electronic musician Kasper T. Toeplitz dispense with any form of narrative in their music theatre installation. They are not interested in illustrating and setting to music the tragic but exciting biography of the boxer. The figure is emblematic of the situation of black Africans and their continent, condemned to passivity and ultimately defenceless against the encroachments of politics, capital and amoral morality from the post-colonialist West. The almost lightless, gloomy production literally and figuratively offers a ‘black and white’ scenario. The treatment of the violent tension between skin colours, between humanity and racism, shows in the violent penetration of physically oppressive images and loud, pulsating sounds the face of the very animalisation with which the white consciousness reacted and still reacts to the black challenge. Video projections of boxing black torsos, barking sharp dogs and a young white girl talking to a black boxer about ticks merge in a thunderstorm of electronically distorted music to create a disturbing space of experience that gets under the skin.

‘JËKK No. 2 - Not an Opera on Boxing’ is a new, heavily modified version of ‘Battling Siki - Boxe et Opéra’, which was commissioned by Theater Bonn as part of its series for experimental music theatre ‘Bonn Chance!’ and premiered in February 2003.