The Past Is in Every Direction

The work explores how humor and poetry might illuminate one another as it spirals through memory, identity, and transformation

Xabiso Vili

Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa

Moving between poetic monologue, stand-up comedy, storytelling, and moments of theatrical rupture, Xabiso Vili revisits recurring selves from across his life: the shy library child, the black nerd, the private school boy, the “coconut,” the performer, the lover, the world champion, and the poet. These do not appear as contradictions, but as different attempts at crossing the distance between ourselves and other people: the many versions of ourselves we become in order to belong.

Developed through live experimentation, the work explores how humor and poetry might illuminate one another as it spirals through memory, identity, and transformation. The performance lets audiences encounter the many people they have been, the ones they are still becoming, and the intimacy of discovering that none of us arrive as one.

Xabiso Vili, Forecast Festival 2026. Photos: Camille Blake

Xabiso Vili, Requeim For Justice.

Xabiso Vili, World Poetry Slam, 2022

Comedian and writer Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa will mentor Vili on his one-man piece. The final production will premiere at the English Theatre in Berlin in January 2027.

Bandara Rajapaksa said: “In our week together thus far at the first stage of Forecast, it was an immense pleasure to see Xabiso’s process at work in real time. The way he is able to integrate and grow within a medium that is at once familiar yet foreign to him is truly astounding. It will be an immense privilege to (hopefully) aid him in the expansion to his already virtuosic practice I know this work can be.”