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Nora Chipaumire: Portrait of myself as my father. 16.08.2018, Tanz im August, Sophiensaele, Berlin.

„But what do you really feel?,“ Brenda Dixon Gottschild wants to know after the show, when a young woman, white, asks about the differences of audiences between Africa and Europe and an older man, white, realizes that Nora, embodying African masculinity, actually is a woman. The last step of the evening, which should also be the first one for every audience member, is connecting your body to what you see and being aware of what Nora Chipaumire’s ‘Manifesto’, performed together with Paps Ibrahim Ndiaye a.k.a. Kaolack and Shamar Watt, does to you – not only on a conceptual level, but also on a visceral level, the level of our flesh and our nervous system. „Put your hands up“, „good people of reason“; this is real, „good people of reason“, this is not a circus show, „good people of reason“, but a boxing right, a messy fight, a memory (of the colonialist construction of becoming a black man, a father who didn’t exist – the question is, does he now exist?), which wants and needs to be loud, not silent, it’s history, even a lesson in history. And ultimately, me, being white, it makes me realize the weight, that now makes us, the audience, silent, not daring to speak, but to listen, „good people of reason“.