Repeating and disrupting embodied histories through performance: Exhibit A Mies Julie and Itsoseng

The concern about South African arts being - as Achille Mbembe claims - ‘stuck in repetition’ can be challenged by examining developments in the performance arts which deliberately employ repetition. In these cases repetition is played with not just as a process of voiding or emptying out, but also to reconceptualise and embody historical and lived experiences. This can involve re-enactments of images, texts and theatrical styles which are worked upon and productively problematised through performance as a live event. In looking at the performance aesthetics of repetition, Diana Taylor’s The archive and the repertoire (2003) provides a useful context, since Taylor’s work straddles the disciplinary intersections between performance studies, anthropology and history. As point of departure, this article focuses on three works produced at the 2012 National Arts Festival, since the accumulation of new and not-new works viewed in quick succession offers scope for identifying aesthetic trends and shifts. Brett Bailey’s Exhibit A, Yael Farber's Mies Julie, and Omphile Molusi's Itsoseng, for instance, demonstrate various aspects of an aesthetics of repetition. The embodied histories that are performed in these works throw up a number of paradoxes. However, the productions do not simply circulate performing bodies as empty aesthetic images, but as transmitters of cultural memory, as well as witnesses to states of profound transition that engage both performers and audiences alike.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Complicit refugees, cosmopolitans and xenophobia: Khaled Hosseini's 'The Kite Runner' and Romesh Gunesekera's 'Reef' in conversation with texts on xenophobia in South Africa

In the aftermath of the brutal xenophobic attacks in parts of South Africa against 'other' Africans between March and May this year, a fairly sustained (if repetitive) public debate has emerged in the local press. The aim is to extend this discussion to South African literary production and to stories from elsewhere - in this case, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. The distinction between complicit refugees and cosmopolitans draws on some of the arguments of Mark Saunders and Anthony Appiah as a framework for comparing Hosseini s popular 'The Kite Runner' (2003) and Gunsekera's lyrical 'Reef' (1994). These will be read in relation to K. Sella Duiker's 'Thirteen Cents' (2000). Establishing a 'conversation' between these texts is associated (from Appiah) with calls/or re-thinking terms such as citizen and cosmopolitan. This, in turn. has implications for the current expressions of and about, xenophobia in South Africa.Scopu

“Connecting Mind to Pen, to Eyes, to Face, to Arms and Legs”: Toward a Performative and Decolonial Teaching Practice

The push to sustain online learning platforms that have been established in the wake of Covid-19 at South African universities raises a number of concerns. Apart from highlighting the stark and ongoing social inequities in terms of access, the need to ensure that there is still scope in our teaching practice for affective and performative encounters has also been thrown into sharp relief. I draw on two teaching contexts, the one dealing with a literary text, and the other a live performance in order to explore the decolonial potential of affective encounter

After thought: Why not a prism?

This special issue of Multilingual Margins is an excellent example of how the guiding concepts of a project are put into practice. The framing of the Re-imagining Multilingualisms project is presented here in what can be termed an appropriately rhizomic, rather than linear structure; this is achieved through the strategic interleaving of theoretical, creative, collaborative and critically reflective perspectives. The title image of interconnected lines of coloured thread pointing to multilingual versions of the same concept, ‘beauty’, reflects this, while the title of the issue, The Cat’s Cradle, recalls the childhood activity where an everyday object – like a piece of string – can be transformed through skilful fingerwork and reimagined as, of all things, the cat’s cradle

The everyday experience of xenophobia: performing The Crossing from Zimbabwe to South Africa

Debates on the underlying causes of xenophobia in South Africa have proliferated since the attacks -between March and May 2008. Our article shows how exploring the everyday 'ordinariness' of xenophobia as performance can contribute additional insights not readily available in the public media or in works such as the recently published Go home or die here.- violence, xenophobia and the reinvention of difference (Hassim et al. 2009). The claim that as metaphor the meaning of performance is discovered in the dialectic established between the fictitious and actual context, provides a point of departure for a discussion of an autobiographical one-man play, The Crossing, in which Jonathan Nkala performs .his hazardous and 'illegal' rites of passage from Zimbabwe to South Africa. The play's aesthetic of 'witnessing', associated with the protest generation, intersects with and looks beyond a post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) aesthetic. To contextualise our discussion of Nkala's work we track trends in responses to xenophobia, including the suggestion that the attacks were underpinned by prevailing discourses of exceptianaJism and indigeneity. However, the intimacy of targeting those living close to you needs fuller anatysis. We will argue that the liminality of the performance event provides scope for making connections not directly 'there' at the moment of performance. This has a bearing on the 'return' to Fanon and claims about 'negrophobia' characterising many reports in the public domain on the events of 2008. In turn, this invites speculation about the re-alignments indicated here.DHE

Little perpetrators, witness-bearers and the young and the brave: towards a post-transitional aesthetics

The aesthetic choices characterizing work produced during the transition to democracy have been well documented. We are currently well into the second decade after the 1994 election - what then of the period referred to as the 'second transition'? Have trends consolidated, hardened, shifted, or have new 'post-transitional' trends emerged? What can be expected of the future 'born free' generation of writers and readers, since terms such as restlessness, dissonance and disjuncture are frequently used to describe the experience of constitutional democracy as it co-exists with the emerging new apartheid of poverty? Furthermore, what value is there in identifying post-transitional aesthetic trends?DHE

Spectacles of Excess or Threshold to the ‘New’?: Brett Bailey and the Third World Bunfight Performers

One of the most innovative and controversial presences at the Grahamstown festival over last few years has undoubtedly been Brett Bailey and his Third World Bunfight performers. Both the controversy and innovation are associated with his use of what can be called shock aesthetics, as well as with the subjects dealt with in the plays which he describes as ‘worlds in collision’. Looking at some of the pre-and-post-production shots, one gets a sense of what he means when he says, ‘I have quite a crude aesthetic ... but I can see what’s beautiful underneath the shell’ (qtd in Smith, 4). Often these do not represent actual scenes from the plays, but offer suggestive, highly stylised, yet literally embodied images either as freeze-frame tableaux or moving spectacle. For example, the 1999 festival brochure advertising The Prophet depicts Abey Xakwe, the protean actor who appears in many guises as central figure in most Bunfight productions, here playing Nongqawuse, posed on top of a hill, Christlike, with arms outstretched. (Se figure 3, p. 256.) Observing the hill more closely one sees that it is composed of aesthetically intertwined corpses, seaweed and cattle skulls. Such visual metaphor yoking together Christian sacrifice and the history of the Xhosa Cattle killing is typical of Bailey’s work which symbolically and literally intrudes onto culturally sacred ground. However, again typically, this particular image is not necessarily a connection explored in the play itself

Antigone’s return: When a once-told story is not enough

Encountering an old story in a reimagined way is sometimes deliberately more unsettling than pleasurably familiar in its new guise. A case in point is a recent revisioning of Sophocles’ Antigone, arguably the most frequently recalled story from the classical canon, which has seen several local iterations over time – most notably in The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona (1973). The focus here is how the re-enactment of the Antigone story, Antigone (not quite/quiet) at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 2019, produced as part of a project on Re-imagining Tragedy in the Global South, generates a multi-layered reading experience within the affect-laden and communal atmosphere of a live performance event. Reading here encompasses several dimensions: apart from reading the re-envisioned performative response in relation to its much-translated ‘original’ version, there is the experience of reading as an embodied, affective encounter in the context of the live performance event. In addition, this invites a process of reading around classic texts, which as I argue, can revitalise the intersections between current and apparently forgotten texts in one’s own reading history. In reflecting on Antigone (not quite/quiet) for instance, in relation to the contemporary need for ‘stark fictions’ of the past in developing an ethics of responsibility, I was struck by an unbidden recollection of Thomas Hardy’s preoccupation with tragedy in late nineteenth-century Victorian England. As I shall show, Hardy’s frequent rebuttals in response to often somewhat dismissive accusations of his over-determined pessimism reveal his foresight in understanding the necessity of a tragic sensibility, which in hindsight now makes sense ‘differently’ and even anticipates some current debates on the revelatory and critically urgent aspects of a tragic consciousness