ERIBUWENI RA LWANDLE | ON THE SHORELINE

European Premiere

What happens when a story emerges as a recurring dream asking to be told – yet not in the performer’s voice, but in the voices of those populating the dream? They beg to be heard, they ask why their lives were snuffed out, and why they were killed, unburied, never mentioned. ERIBUWENI RA LWANDLE | ON THE SHORELINE grew from this dream as it combines object theatre, performance, and trance-like movement patterns.

As dreams are always patchy, abundant with sparse information, so are the histories of slavery, of colonisation, of apartheid, full of the unseen, the unheard, the undocumented. It is this fragmentary cacophony from which this play attempts to derive a meaning: the missing, the ghosts of the dead, the untold truths. They are all a result of obliteration; a practice of collective callousness that renders certain persons and groups invisible. While positioning some at the centre of history and others on the margins, they reinforce the existing order: the conqueror as a hero, immortalised in statue, stands opposite the defeated victims’ lack of recognition. Whose stories are taught and told, whose misery is recognised, whose dead are mourned?