The Centre for the Less Good Idea is an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts based in Maboneng, Johannesburg

RE-MEMBERING

Slindile Mthembu is an award-winning playwright, director, dramaturg, and theatre-maker.

This Considered 3 Minutes is a collaboration between Mthembu and Thembinkosi Mavimbela. Prior to this work, as part of The Long Minute series, we shared a version of ‘Re-membering’ by Mthembu which was an act of editing existing staged performance into the confines of a minute. There, Mthembu explored the staging of memory through the lived experience of black women.

In Mthembu’s words: “Is it possible to erase memory from a black female body? ‘Re-membering’ is a conversation with an oppressor. As a response to retrieving past memories through the representation of the complex, racialised, sexualised dissection of the black female body. Here I stage the lived experiences of black womanhood that can dramatise issues of gender, race, and class discrimination that are experienced on multiple levels by black women living in post-colonial South Africa. My creative process seeks to collapse habitual, chronological, and often one-dimensional narratives depicting black women and their lives.”