Laughter is sustained into One Drop by Sonya Lindfors (Cameroon/Finland), a piece with both big anticipation and raucous aftermath, featuring an all-black cast, including an opera singer. Capitalism, coloniality and modernity are concepts implied and theatricalised, tossed around and dissected, in an ‘autopsy of the Western Stage’. Where to begin?
Almost 2 hours long, One Drop’s first success is that it didn’t feel it. Reggae style drumbeats, rhythms known as ‘one drop’, loosen the audience as two performers freestyle; movement grounded in the restless feet and swaying hips. Later, in a stark shift in mood (a frequent occurrence) haunting opera vocals swamp the space as one performer ripples lethargically in an impossibly sparkly gold dress, refracting stage lights into dazzling stars. She moves softly, but her fists are clenched.
Somewhere in the middle of the show, the fourth wall is abruptly broken by a voice from the audience: a performer throwing conversational banter as she struts down the stairs and talks to us and, to the dismay of many, expects answers. What does it mean to be a Black contemporary artist, to make it into a white organisation, like the one we are all sat in? She describes what sounds like elitism in dance industries, but is actually racism. Next, she demands resources to support her cause. Audience members reluctantly empty their pockets of phones, gold jewellery, and feeble offering of Cadbury’s chocolate.
In the second half of the show, the stage is entirely draped in white sheets (carried out by the choreographer herself, in a white hazmat suit). Enter, what Lindfors says she has never seen done before: a black opera singer singing classical songs, smeared in blood. The dancers then gather as an ignorant theatre group attempting to make a play about colonialism. It puts many of us to silent shame by exposing what history has erased, then cracks us into goofy laughter as the performers bumble about, trying to piece together an entire historical landscape of colonisation.
One Drop is of a huge scale, belonging to many categories inextricably linked; nothing occurs in a vacuum. Hearing Lindfors speak post-show, I found myself seeking explanation for what were clearly metaphors. Some felt blindingly obvious later on: the gold dress representing the black body as ‘ore’, a gold mine, for slave traders. But much of the piece is meant to be posed, not answered. One Drop rebels exclusivity, claims traditionally white concepts, such as opera, and restyles them using exuberant lights, slick irony and contrasting genres of movement and music. It feels like a fever dream, a confusing, exciting jumble of references, not to mention an elastic sense of time. Tenses slip inexplicably. Traces of Black ancestry leak into utopias imagined in the form of strobe lights. And a delicate duet, so ambiguous as we gradually lose it to stage haze, feels like a memory belonging to neither past nor future.
Because of, not despite, its existentialism, One Drop bounces back to alluring satire and play. The entire experience is jovial, from Lindfors’ personal introduction in the foyer to her stage appearance. And with October being Black History Month in the UK, the celebratory affirmation of safe community rendered the evening deeply necessary. I vividly recall the buzz, but pennies are still dropping; I fear what I missed. References elude me due to lack of context and inevitable ignorance. With my patchwork understanding, I caught what I could, but works like this feel crucial to discovering new avenues of perspective.
