With „Sorry“, the Berlin based performance group Monster Truck and Nigerian choreographer Segun Adefila engage in a discourse about the (im)possibility of an encounter on equal terms, overshadowed by asymmetrical postcolonial power dynamics. On a white playground, five young skinny boys from Bariga meet a heavyset white man from Germany. Youthful innocence meets the proverbial stranger who offers the children chocolate; postcolonial hopelessness meets the stereotypical embodiment of Europe’s colonial guilt, contemporary Nigerian dance meets European conceptual theater.
A horror movie of its own special kind enfolds– an intercultural encounter staged as a nightmarish play without borders, which leaves the audience puzzled about who the final winner is. Who will be dependent on whom in the end? Who is benefitting from this encounter and how? And who is the vampire sucking the other one dry?
Segun Adefila lives and works as choreographer, director and performer in Lagos, Nigeria. He has studied Creative Arts at the University of Lagos and in 1996 founded the Crown Troupe of Africa, a dance and Theatre Company in Bariga, Lagos state, for which he acts as art director. Today he works in dance, theatre, music and visual arts. His works have been shown internationally in the UK, Trinidad, Tobago and Germany. He has also portrayed the main character in the award-winning documentary “Bariga Boy” by Femi Odugbemi. www.crowntroupeofafrica.co
The Footprints of David are the young offspring of Segun Adefila’s Crown Troupe. Originally founded in 2005 by Oluwaseun Awobajo with the aim to change people’s view of children from the ghetto, Awobajo started his project with just four children from the neighborhood and now oversees the training of more than forty regulars. Around twenty of them are also offered accommodation in the project. The group has already won several awards and performs around Nigeria at dance and theatre festivals as well as at official occasions and regularly in projects of the Crown Troupe. Several members of the footprints also routinely star in movies and TV productions.
Artistic directors: Monster Truck & Segun Adefila Sound: Alice Ferl Light: Stine Hertel Actors: Muiz Adebayo, Moses Akintunde, Andreas Klinger, John Lakutu, Ridwan Rasheed, Waris Rasheed Artistic collaboration: Seun Awobajo Production management: ehrliche arbeit – freelance office for culture
Artist management: Abiodun Adefila, Theresa Pommerenke
A production by Monster Truck and The Footprints of David, Sophiensaele Berlin, Theater Rampe Stuttgart, Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf, Goethe-Institut Nigeria, funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Berlin Senate Chancellery for Cultural Affairs.