SPAfrica

For this to happen, Europeans collect their tears of compassion and rain them down on Africa. An exchange of water for tears and tears for water, of natural for emotional resources.

This theatre performance asks highly pertinent questions. Can compassion achieve anything, or does it only strengthen existing economic power relations? Are morals and trauma anything more than capital in the economic and political competition? Or in the arts, in the struggle for funding and attention?

Europe and Africa, ethics and the economy, morals and business, trauma and dream. Julian Hetzel, a German from the Netherlands, and the South African Ntando Cele play with models of exploitation, empathy and whitewashing. Their intense and highly entertaining show brings about a collision of the discursive contradictions around (neo-)colonialism, guilt and diversity.

Ntando Cele is a brilliant performer, singer and rapper. Together with the theatre-maker Julian Hetzel she creates excellent political theatre in which both practitioners put themselves and their identities on the line.