“At the heart of Minor Music is a powerful spirit of collective creation – bringing together a constellation of celebrated art ists and combining literature, film, installation art, movement, and sound into a singular stage experience.”
Thus Beatrix Ruf, director of the Hartwig Art Foundation and commission er and presenter of the project, describes the performative event that will be staged exclusively at Teatro Goldoni during the preview days of Biennale Arte 2026, on May 5 and 6 at 8:30 pm and on May 7 at 4 pm, followed by a presentation talk.
Minor Music at the End of the World by writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman is a three-movement theatrical adaptation based on her celebrated essay The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance, which draws inspiration from The Comet by W.E.B. Du Bois, a speculative short story written in the aftermath of the 1918 global pandemic that imagines the end of the world, as well as from a new work, Dead River, a performative text conceived as a ceremony of life in the wake of catastrophe.
The stage performance explores the possibil ity of Black life at the end of the world and in the aftermath of racial capitalism and white supremacy.
Against this com plex and layered backdrop, Minor Music conveys a series of catastrophes converging at a critical turning point: among them, the arrival of Africans in New York City, the first slave auction in Lower Manhattan, the precarity of Black life, global pandemics, and environmental disasters that render life seemingly unlivable. In doing so, it raises a series of pierc ing questions about Black life at the end of the world and the new social formations that emerge from it. Directed by Sarah Benson, Minor Music at the End of the World features a film by Arthur Jafa, leading performances by actor André Holland and actor and sound-movement artist Okwui Okpokwasili, and artistic contributions by Precious Okoyomon, whose powerful scenographic intervention provides the haunting landscape for the second movement, and Cameron Rowland, under the executive production of Professor Tina Campt and Beatrix Ruf (director of the Hartwig Art Foundation and of the future Hartwig Museum).
Together with Hartman, this ensemble transforms her original essays into a site-specific performance in three movements: Movement I: The End of White Supremacy – with André Holland; Movement II: Dead River – with Okwui Okpokwasili, Bria Bacon, Audrey Hailes, and AJ Wilmore; Movement III: The World Is Dead – a film by Arthur Jafa. “It’s important to say that Minor Music isn’t a play. It’s performed discourse. This is consonant with the African diasporic intellectual tradition, where poetry finds a place in critical writing. It’s alive, like Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939). I’m following in the path of many other artists who are trying to create thought in multiple domains. It’s not that I’m leaving my discipline and going into another. How do we make thought in multiple places, like the stage, the performance, Arthur’s film, Precious’s beau tiful petrified forests, the movement of Okwui”? – Saidiya Hartman.
