HFBK

Thelma Buabeng—presents Tell Me Nothing From The Horse

A sharp, comedic, and cabaret-style solo performance that critiques race, gender, and representation with biting humor and disarming intimacy. Buabeng shapes and animates characters that are seldom seen in larger media, offering the immigrant and Black German or Afro-Deutsch experience from an intimate perspective. Buabeng draws from the nuanced and targeted experiences of especially Afro Deutsch folks and puts them at the forefront of an analysis of contemporary politics and media.

How the series resonates Monster, Minor, Margin: Performance as Study curated by Kandis Williams with the Extended Library
The Extended Library treats performance as a form of knowledge production—an embodied practice that translates lived experience into public study. This series explores how Black performers stage negotiations between identity, humor, sonic experimentation, various audience recognitions including negotiating sterreotyping. These negotiations are additionally made in spaces that have very different demands of the performer from independent, theatre, film and commercial spaces. With Thelma Buabeng’s comedic/cabaret solo performance (Tell Me Nothing From The Horse) and Tapiwa Svosve’s concert-lecture with guest collaborator Tobechukwu Onwukeme (Forensic Architecture), exploring through-lines of frequencies in Black radical sound, the program opens a window into how performance formats create and contest meaning. Both practices show how performance operates as critique, pedagogy, and archive at once. These events resonate directly with my concurrent seminar, Monster, Minor, Margin: Black Body / Being / Performance in Archive and Media, which examines the circulation and contestation of highly aestheticized Black figures in culture.