Season 6 was co-curated by architect and urban designer Thiresh Govender and dancer and choreographer Sello Pesa of Ntsoana ContemporaryTheatre, alongside founder William Kentridge and co-animateurs Bronwyn Lace and Phala Ookeditse Phala.
PROGRAMME 2
PAUSE
[See FULL Performance here: https://vimeo.com/371571303]
The mask has a long history in performance and dance. In PAUSE, choreographer Kieron Jina employs masking as a means of puzzling out identity and expression in contemporary African narratives.
Emerging on stage in a costume of blankets, gumboots and skin-tight materials, Jina’s character is completely concealed and anonymous to the audience. Hidden beneath multiple layers, the character’s movement are made thick and weighty, so much so that each step is a burden. Juxtaposing this is a series of projected videos showing traditional dances and performances across the African continent, each performer donning a different mask and costume, and moving freely across the frame. Sparse text intersperses the performance, white lettering appears on an empty black background, while distorted spoken word sounds out at key moments.
Throughout the compact and entrancing physical performance, Jina begins to shed the costume, bit by bit. Layers and masking serve as shrewd cultural commentary, here. For Jina, the performance serves as a channel through which to revisit contemporary understandings of race, culture, history, and representation with the purpose of including queerness as a valuable and equally important part of African narratives. Part staged chorographical work and part performance art, PAUSE also challenges the boundaries between public space and theatre stages.
Finally, the piece interrogates – by way of choreography, imagery, and pointed text – the relationship between work, practice, identity, capitalistic labour, and innate ritual. It is the sum of this multi-media performance, rather than its individual components, that troubles our ways of thinking about identity and labour in a contemporary African context.
Conceptualised & Performed by | Kieron Jina
Text by | Kgosi Motsoane
Video by | Kieron Jina & Negiste Yesside Johnson
Sound Design by | Yogin Sullaphen
Costume Design by | Roman Handt
Dramaturgy by | Phala Ookeditse Phala
UNCHINI WENA!
[See FULL Performance here: https://vimeo.com/371571959]
The seemingly simple acts of singing, playing, and music-making take on deeper meaning in Micca Manganye’s Unchini Wena!
Taking to the stage in the character of a delightfully upbeat child, Manganye proceeds to recreate a scene that is sobering and painful to witness, before employing percussion as a tool for storytelling and healing. Three conga drums become the vehicle for this narrative, with Manganye oscillating between the performance modes of actor and musician with ease.
In Unchini Wena! drums become characters, metaphors, tools both curative and destructive in a story that’s pace is controlled by rhythm as much as it is by script. Manganye is, at times, a chaotic blend of pain and rage, laying down a furious and rasping percussive sentence. Other times he is calm and introspective, an open palm sliding contemplatively over the skin of a single drum, or that of a bare chest.
There is a moment when, after considering his own hands and the potential they hold, Manganye begins to beat out an extraordinary percussive solo on his own cheeks, each slap reverberating out across the stage. Following this, he correlates a single beat of the drum to a single wound on his body.
It is this reconciling of instrument and body into tools for percussion and expression that is at the heart of Unchini Wena! Through the hands of Manganye, then, the music being performed is as embodied as the memory that informs it.
Conceptualised & Performed by | Michael Micca Manganye
Directed by | Phala Ookeditse Phala
Dramaturgy by | Nhlanhla Mahlangu
Cinematography & Editing by |Noah Cohen
Writing by | David Mann