Saidiya HartmanMinor Music at the End of the WorldThe International Theater Amsterdam (ITA)

Minor Music at the End of the World is a performance in three movements based on SAIDIYA HARTMAN's acclaimed essays, The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance and alongside new writings inspired by the author’s Litany for Grieving Sisters. 

DIRECTED BY SARAH BENSON

FEATURING ANDRÉ HOLLAND, OKWUI OKPOKWASILI AND FILM BY ARTHUR JAFA

COMMISSIONED AND PRESENTED BY HARTWIG ART FOUNDATION

How does one live at the end of the world? Is it possible to envision a world without racism? And what would be required to produce such a world?

This new work takes as its point of departure W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Comet, a speculative fictional tale of the end of the world written in the wake of the pandemic of 1918. Minor Music is presented in three movements:

Movement I: The End of White Supremacy — Featuring Andre Holland
Movement II: Dead River — Featuring Okwui Okpokwasili
Movement III: The World is Dead — A film by Arthur Jafa

The work enacts the enduring crisis of black life in the context of racial capitalism, managed depletion, and white supremacy. Against this complexly layered backdrop, Minor Music conveys an ongoing series of catastrophes that converge at this critical inflection point — among others, the arrival of Africans in New York City, the first slave auction in lower Manhattan, the precarity of black life, global pandemics, and environmental catastrophes that make life seemingly unlivable. In doing so, it provokes a series of penetrating questions about black life at the end of the world and the new social formations that arise in its wake.

Directed by Sarah Benson, Minor Music at the End of the World features cinematic elements by Arthur Jafa, lead performances by actor André Holland and actor/sonic movement artist Okwui Okpokwasili.

New York/Amsterdam, 2024 – 2025

2024 – 2025 is a pivotal moment that highlights the significant historical connection between New York and Amsterdam. Four hundred years ago, in 1624, Dutch colonists founded New Amsterdam on the island of Manahahtáanung— the ancestral home of the Lenape people now known as Manhattan. This event led to the displacement and oppression of Indigenous peoples that predates English colonisation. Amsterdam will celebrate its 750th anniversary in 2025. The city and its former sister city New Amsterdam — now New York — share complex and contested histories marked by trade, colonisation and slavery. These histories have profoundly shaped both communities, and they continue to reckon with them today.

A one-night-invitation-only dress rehearsal, the culmination of a year-long series of development workshops, was held in November 2024 at BAM’s Harvey Theater (NY), leading up to a world premiere at ITA in Amsterdam in October 2025.