This October, Amsterdam will host one of the most anticipated cultural highlights of the year. The Hartwig Art Foundation presents the world premiere of Minor Music at the End of the World, a groundbreaking stage performance written by acclaimed scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman and directed by Sarah Benson. Taking place from October 3rd to 5th, 2025, at the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA), the production invites audiences to reflect on history, catastrophe, and the enduring possibility of reimagining Black life.
Exploring Black life at the end of the world
Inspired by Hartman’s essays The End of White Supremacy and Litany for Grieving Sisters, and by W.E.B. Du Bois’s speculative short story The Comet, the performance unfolds across three movements. It poses questions that resonate deeply today: How does one live at the end of the world? Can we imagine a world without racism? And what would it take to build such a future?
Performed by actor André Holland, interdisciplinary artist Okwui Okpokwasili, and with a cinematic contribution by Arthur Jafa, Minor Music at the End of the World traverses histories of displacement, slavery, pandemics, and environmental crises. Each movement reflects on how catastrophe reshapes life, and how Black life persists and creates new social forms despite impossible conditions.
A landmark in Amsterdam cultural events
The production is a collective creation, blending literature, film, movement, and installation into a singular artistic experience. Alongside Hartman, the team includes Benson, Jafa, Holland, Okpokwasili, Precious Okoyomon, and Cameron Rowland—figures whose practices span stage, screen, and visual art. Together, they transform Hartman’s writings into an immersive meditation on memory and futurity.
The premiere also coincides with Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary, a moment that underscores the city’s entangled history with New York and the Dutch colonial past. The event serves not only as one of the most important Amsterdam cultural events of 2025, but also as a profound opportunity to reflect on the legacies of trade, colonisation, and slavery that continue to shape both cities across the Atlantic.
The three movements
- Movement I: The End of White Supremacy — Performed by André Holland
- Movement II: Dead River — Performed by Okwui Okpokwasili with Bria Bacon, Audrey Hailes, and AJ Wilmore
- Movement III: The World is Dead — A film by Arthur Jafa
This triptych reveals how past and present catastrophes—economic, racial, and ecological—intersect in ways that make imagining survival and liberation all the more urgent.
Minor Music at the End of the World is more than a stage performance: it is a collective vision, a dialogue between history and possibility, and a reminder of the transformative role of art.
Minor Music at the End of the World. Rehearsal at BAM’S HARVEY THEATRE, November 2024
Commissioned and presented by HARTWIG ART FOUNDATION
Photography by MARIA BARANOVA
