Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure

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One of 1 Across 1 Another

When we think about the concept of “quiet”, and how we attribute it to different groups of people, situations, and contexts, it is noticeable how rarely this quality is attributed to Black people and Black cultures throughout the Diaspora. In our society, we come to think of Black people as synonymous with flamboyant, mesmerizing, loud, and “larger than life”, therefore missing on the quiet and intimate cues Blackness offers. Those observations led SLB (Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure) to wander and research through the spaces where the iconography of our humanity is built - namely, the theatre and the cinema - with a desire to challenge “the spectacularity” of the Black body and the narratives that built it and continue to uphold it.

Through a two-channel film and a live performance, One of 1 Across 1 Another introduces “the usher”: a performative figure that embodies the tensions between care and control, between servitude and refusal. With its ambiguous gestures of subservience and escape, the usher disrupts notions of identity, race, and authority, complicating the line between subjecthood and objecthood. Enfleshing relations between spectatorship and (non)performance, the work crafts a space for questions and doubts to reverberate: which expectations and assumptions haunt our conditioned gaze? How do we orient ourselves, when offered a compass pulled by a mutable North?

Contending with the politics of otherness that the topology of spectatorship and logics of coloniality created through deeply seeded tropes and fascinations of the Black body, and are upheld by all fields that tend to image production, One of 1 Across 1 Another attempts to connect through the troubles of reckoning, pointing towards one’s agency for transformation, liberation, and imagination.

Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure is a performance, sound, and video maker whose practice materializes the fugitive points of friction between ecstasy and mourning, stillness and haunting. In addressing the degrees of legibility suspended in our gazes, the diasporic imaginary, and the complexities of representation, SLB builds expressive systems of repair that speculate on the poetic notions of singularity. She has shown works and performed at Moma PS1, Centre Pompidou, ICA London and Miami, MCBA Museum, Arsenic Theatre, Tanzhaus Zürich, Gessnerallee, Friart Kunsthalle, Hartwig Foundation, and Berghain, among others.

Credits

On Screen

Written and Directed by: Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure
Camera: Peteris Viksna
Produced by: DAS Theatre
Co-Produced by: ETERNAL
Kairo Edwards as Usher 1
Naomi Katthagen as Usher 2
Koffi Boanyah as Usher 3
Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure as Usher-in-Chief
Choreography: SLB, Venuri Perera
Movement Director: Xiomara Virdo
Edit: SLB
Colour Grading: Peteris Viksna
Original Soundtrack: Bonaventure
Technical Director: Mirko Lazović
Lights: Nisala Sathyajith Saheed
Best Boy: Udo Hakemann
Gaffer: Harco Haagsma
casting: GOD
Art Direction: SLB
Make Up: Babygod
External Eye: Olamiju Fajemisin, Tundé Adefioye

On Stage

Directed by: Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure
Choreography: Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure
Movement Direction: Xiomara Virdo
Choreographical advice: Venuri Perera
Dramaturgical advice: Marta Keil, Perry Gits, Arnold Arakaza
External Eye: Leandro De Souza, Tundé Adefioye, Julian Hetzel
Tutor: Marta Keil, Samah Hijawi
Usher 1: Xiomara Virdo
Usher 2: Priscilla Virdo
Usher 3: Carlotta Cantagalli
Usher 4: Ivalu Carlsen
Usher 5: Clarinde Wesselink
Usher 6: Ainhoa Hernández Escudero
Original Soundtrack: Bonaventure
Additional Music: “RED BONE” acapella by Donald Glover
Casting: GOD
Art Direction: SLB
Make Up: Babygod
Consultants: Zahra, Jana, Veronika, Eva-LOU and Sam