Bana ba Baloyi? (Sorcerer’s Children?), Side A
A night with Sun Xa Experiment
Concert
Fr., 22.11.2024
20:00–21:30
Miriam Makeba Auditorium
€7/5 (single concert)
€10/7 (both concerts)
Sun Xa Experiment (the name is a celestial meeting between Sun Ra and Ndikho Xaba) is a musical outfit that anchors its approach in afrofuturism. Their visceral and transcendental sound can best be understood as a musical journey from the heart of Soweto, and aims to resonate with innate spiritual codes of all human existence. Sun Xa Experiment leads a performance that has been conceived as a sonic chronicle of the trials, tribulations, and insurmountable triumphs of the Drill Hall, serving as a mirror of the restless land/people and their riotous movements across space and time. The narrative unfolds over a two-night concert at HKW’s Miriam Makeba Auditorium, both a summoning and a reckoning. The title of the offering is borrowed from one of the songs in the forthcoming two-night set – the notion of sorcery/witchcraft carries a plethora of meanings that challenges society to reframe them in terms that blasts open possibilities of placing colonialism as one of the many ways of thinking about trickery, consumption and annihilation on the one hand, as well as emancipation, healing and cleansing on the other, as central to reclamation of boloi/sorcery/witchcraft as (soft)power for the former and currently oppressed peoples of the world. The metaphysical collaborator on stage—coarse salt, symbolic of cleansing and fortification amongst many other functions—is a vital component of the performance, complicating the question of who exactly are Bana ba Baloyi, eintlek?