Holding Ground is a multilingual live performance that weaves story-theatre, song, and poetry to explore home, memory, and connection across distance. Rooted in the artist’s South African - German heritage, it reflects on life between languages, homelands, and generations through quilt-making and beadwork. At its core is a patchwork of modern-day “love letters” - WhatsApp messages, voice notes, screenshots, and music links - transformed into quilted squares. This evolving quilt becomes a soft archive of care, an attempt to hold what is often intangible or fleeting.
The work draws on personal narrative and research into the visual poetics of German Blaudruck/Isishweshwe textiles and Southern African beadwork love letters, tracing material heritage movements through German–South African trade histories into personal meaning-making. These communal traditions, alongside stories passed down by grandmothers at the sewing machine and photo album, shape a performance that is both intimate and resonant. Audience members are gently invited into the act of quilting - passing a pin, holding the image - participating in a shared practice of “holding ground.” From the fragments of memory, language, lineage and homes, an alchemical process of making home in the in-between takes place and cannot be done alone.
Tobi King Bakare and this theatre deserve a shout-out for such a young, diverse audience. There is so much talk about audiences being full of over 60s and why, why can’t theatres get the crowds in to reflect society in general? Well, I’m happy to say that on a rainy Thursday evening, the theatre was completely full.
Caiti Grove on Before I Go in CPT's Spring 2023 season London Theatre Reviews
