Song as a Register for Black Feminist Theatre-Making Aesthetic (original) (raw)
Related papers
Performance Paradigm, 2020
I Stand Corrected (Adebayo & Nyamza) provides an opportunity to think through Black agency as refusal in performance, via an aesthetic of ambiguity and complicity. From the vantage point of the trash can, these two performers offer moments of what Mojisola Adebayo calls “revolutionary hope” (2015), staging a beautiful, unlikely marriage between the zombie body and the surviving woman. I also engage with photography by queer 'visual activist' Zanele Muholi. In their introduction to a special issue on feminist theory and the global South, Celia Roberts and Raewyn Connell say: “theory is normally produced in the metropole and exported to the periphery, while the periphery normally produces data and exports this raw material to the metropole” (2016, 134-135). Although this perspective forms part of a move towards producing theory of the South, I posit that theorising with and alongside performance in particular enables us to destabilise some assumptions of meaningfulness and the knowledge economy. Within this epistemic split (often understood between theory and practice) it is not only the theorist – divorced from the body and in my case, located outside of my home country (South Africa) – that produces knowledge outside embodied experience (being, doing, seeing). The contested, often ambiguous nature of knowing can be foregrounded in and by performance in particular and distinctive ways. This article therefore seeks to mobilise performance analysis towards Southern epistemologies.
Post-apartheid performance art as a site of gender resistance
Agenda, 2001
only risen to some prominence since apartheid's abolition and the 1994 democratic elections. Subsequently it has been utilised by South African artists to make apparent ways in which the body itself acts as a stage/screen/canvas/site for history, politics, culture, economics, race and social issues. This paper aims to explore how two female South African artists, Carol-anne Gainer and Tracey Rose, have utilised Performance Art as a site of gender resistance in the context of South Africa.
Dissonances from the Global South: Song, Art and Performance in Cultures of Struggle
Taking up the important work of other theorists of performance, social memory and the political in Africa and Latin America we restate the need for a reconfigured understanding of how performance – and in particular forms of expressive art – impinges on the practice of politics and is in fact embedded within it. Memory as held in the body can be both replayed within, and can re-form, the present. Thus, history overlays but is also redrawn through acts of performance. This in its totality may well be a significant point of creative dissonance emanating from the Global South as communities and artists in societies under stress make new forms of commentary through performance, which hold within them the penumbra of the past. We draw together aspects of body, voice and performance as articulated in the papers in this cluster. While there is no single critical position, a constant point emerging is the need to reconfigure how moments of creativity, past and present, should to be reinserted in the broader ambit of both national and transnational understandings of how we configure history and the present.
Aesthetics of South African Women’s Embodied Activism: Staging Complicity
Contemporary Theatre Review, 2018
Feminism is a complex subject in Africa, and the relationship between gender studies scholars based in Africa and those based in North America and Europe has been strained because of 'the differences in political environments and experiences of racism as well as interpretations of feminist ideologies and different political alliances and coalitions'. 1 Many African women prefer to speak of 'African feminism' 2 or 'Africana womanism', 3 which highlights the specific legacies of colonialism in the current oppressions experienced by Africana women. 4 However, Gwendolyn Mikell 5 identifies the following issues as being of particular concern to women in Africa: political sovereignty, their nation's economies and domestic cultures, production and reproduction, motherhood, child mortality, marriage and bride-price, female circumcision, polygamy, access to education, and the clash between local and global values and identities. Like any ideology, African feminism is nuanced according to how it is formulated and negotiated within the details of a particular environment. As there are 58 countries, over 2000 languages and many more cultures, approaches to African feminisms differ according to context. For the purposes of this article, I am going to focus on how two South African women artists post-1994 are negotiating their understandings of their own sexualities, cultures, and identities in order to transcend what Jane Bennett and Charmaine Pereira call 'the beleaguered, and ever narrowing, spaces. .. of "gender and development" or "empowerment"'. 6 I begin by contextualising South African women practitioners, and this moment in feminist practice. During apartheid, Temple Hauptfleisch argued, 'most. .. women operated mainly in the private and commercial
Theatre Topics, 2019
Acts of Transgression, edited by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle, speaks to the aesthetics of crises observed in performance or "live art" in contemporary South Africa. The subversive nature of the performances discussed in this book is related to lingering emotions of anger, resentment, and dispossession, but also to a way of articulating the unsayable-the desire to know, to say, and to be (Braidotti 2011, 126). The authors contributing to this book question an understanding of art as mere representations of identities and humanist notions of self, rather positioning figurations as "embedded and embodied, social positions" (Braidotti 2011, 5), constantly in flux and operating as a process of teasing out new meanings of citizenship, agency, and relationality. Acts of Transgression is the product of Pather's and Boulle's longstanding interest in and engagement with performance practices in South Africa, supported by the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, where they are based. The volume consists of 15 chapters, divided into four sections, each addressing a different aspect of the multidisciplinary field of performance or "live art", as it is referred to in this book. The book contains engagements with a variety of artists' work by a diverse collection of authors, critics, and artist-writers, who each contribute in a meaningful way to the debates offered in this book. Although there are chapters offering fresh perspectives on well-known and established performance artists such as Tracey Rose, Steven Cohen, and Athi-Patra Ruga, many of the authors engage with emerging artists and practices which straddle boundaries between various art forms, such as dance and theatre, but also guerilla performances, protest, collaboration, and curation. Pather, in the introduction to the book, also makes