There was no sound at first. Only the hush of bodies realigning. Then—antler scraped hide. A throat called something ancient and vowel-heavy, and the walls of Brixton began to retract.
This was not the start. It had already begun before we arrived. Maybe before we were born. The Opening Ceremony an invocation, the circle formed. The space closed. Smoke (or was it light?) curled between limbs, not rising, but settling like memory. They beat the drum as if calling time back into its skin. Something opened in the spine.
The first true utterance came like blood warming in winter. In Maidjan pulsed from the floor, not the stage. Drums pounded, they circled, voices layered like rings inside a tree felled centuries ago. Maria Franz stood still as wind-carved stone. Her voice like light through ice, weaving over the rhythm, a thread pulled through pelt and nerve.
You forget your phone exists. Or your name. The crowd swayed, not as an audience, but as a forest reacting to weather. Someone near me was mouthing sounds—not words, but sounds older than them. Everyone’s breath had slowed, like a collective decision to obey the tempo of bones.
And Norupo rose not like a song, but a rune remembered. Harmonies folded inward. The air turned inward. It felt like language realigning itself around breath, symbols heard rather than seen. I watched a man press both palms to his chest, not for reverence, but to hold something in. There was a faint scent of damp moss, or maybe that was just the dampness behind the eyes.
Time stretched. Circled. Looped. Sank.
Then Alfadhirhaiti ruptured. The chants thundered low and wide, spilling across the floor like hot iron poured into cold soil. Kai Uwe Faust’s throat scraped the ceiling, cracked it open. There was movement—violent, orchestrated, sacred. Shield met shield. Limbs met drum. The space was no longer Brixton—it was somewhere else entirely, a grove, a battlefield, a womb. People stomped. Or were stomped. By something bigger.
Anoana both soothed and cleansed. After the chaos, the slow reassembling of breath. The rhythms still primal, but now rounded. Melodic. Maria’s voice wrapped the room in balm, not silence. There was something womanly here—not soft, not gentle—but deeply circular. A closing, a pull toward centre. Not a lullaby, but a remembering. The chants calling and answering.
And just as the body began to trust the rhythm, Hamrer Hippyer tore it open again. The eruption. No warning. Drums like hooves, weapons, thunder. The stage no longer held performers—it held a rite. Combat rituals, spinning limbs, the shattering weight of sound. Every heartbeat in the room aligned. You could feel the audience become part of it—not in metaphor, but physically. Feet struck ground. Voices became noise. Noise became chant. Chant became rite. This was not theatre. It was something older than that. It was necessity.
I don’t know when the Closing Ceremony began, or finished. It withdrew. Like fog returning to stone. The circle closed. They bowed—or maybe just became still. The instruments lowered, or perhaps the sound simply moved back underground. The room held its breath. Then the lights changed—barely. A flicker. As if someone had blinked.
And yet no one left. Not immediately. Because to walk after this—to speak, to move, to be seen—felt wrong. You do not chatter after burial. You do not scroll after resurrection. You wait. You honour the silence. You hold it like a last ember. The final sound wasn’t sound. It was stillness. A held note without vibration.
Even outside, with buses and neon and the stink of London returning, the ritual clung. You felt it in your lungs, thick and metallic. You moved slower. Spoke less. Something had been undone. Or re-done. Or revealed.
Heilung performance was a remembering, and in doing so, made us remember too—though we don’t know what. Only that it was real. That it had weight. That it left something behind. Something unfinished.
Still humming. Still circling. Still here.
Words & Photos by Richard Isaac
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