Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa

Introduction

JAY PATHER AND CATHERINE BOULLE

THE TIMES

On 2 September 2014, audiences entering the Cape Town City Hall on the seventh evening of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) Live Art Festival were hit with the pungent smell of cow dung – the sensory setting of Chuma Sopotela’s Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda (‘The chicken has laid its eggs’).¹ Sopotela’s series of slow and careful ritualised acts included writing ‘Nkandla’ on the wall in dung, in reference to then President Jacob Zuma’s private residence, revealed earlier that year to have been lavishly renovated with the use of public funds. In the course of the performance, Sopotela removed the South African flag from her vagina. Tebogo Munyai’s Doors of Gold unfolded in an adjoining room, where the artist’s naked body was foregrounded as a trope for acute vulnerability in his evocation of the Marikana massacre, but also of the erasure of black men who have died in South Africa’s mines without record or ceremony. In yet another room, Limelight on Rites, by dancer and choreographer Sello Pesa, featured two performers dancing to loud music with and alongside a coffin, while others pitched funeral plans to audience members, similarly highlighting the black body as an expendable commodity for barter and trade – even in death.

These deliberate, sometimes opaque, sometimes stark gestures, and the many that preceded and followed in the Festival programme, seemed to search for a different language – a corporeal vocabulary of seepage and excess – to articulate the distension of the time. Performing states of despair and protest, attack and response, against an overwhelming onslaught on the black body by continued economic and psychic oppression, they cited the failure of systems of communication; a breakdown of language and logic.

Only six months later, Chumani Maxwele flung excrement at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the University of Cape Town’s Upper Campus in an act of calculated political significance that was also a searing physical manifestation of emotional overflow.² Dressed in black tights and a bright pink hard hat with a placard that read ‘EXHIBIT WHITE ARROGANCE @ UCT,’ Maxwele’s striking intervention, as deliberate and crafted as a performance, cut through layers of obfuscation around institutional racism to give voice to an irrepressible anger and impatience at the slow pace of change in a supposedly postcolonial country.

This action, and the subsequent Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement to which it gave rise, tapped into expanses of feeling, which, once released, could not be contained. Emotion spilled out beyond the confines of ‘rational’ response, rupturing attempts, of the kind that have become synonymous with South Africa’s transitional reconciliation period, to neutralise expressions of pain or to silence outpourings of anger. Advancing a politics of radical action, the movement was a backlash against the rationalist imperative to ‘put into words,’ a collective assertion that talking has proven ineffectual and that compromise has operated as a cover for ‘a regime of forgetting.’³

In South Africa, live art is born of extremity. Its syncretic form has evolved in response to rapidly changing social climates, colonial imposition, cultural fragmentation and political upheaval; its affective tenor of excess and irrationality embodies the unpredictability of crisis. It proffers a new language that resists the narratives of certainty and linearity through which a neocolonial agenda has been perpetuated (even if sometimes inadvertently) in this country, reflecting – without seeking to resolve – the inscrutability and urgency of states of socio-political flux.

TROUBLING TERMS

In the west, too, performance art has its roots in times of extremity. It flourished in early twentieth-century Europe alongside the rise of fascism, culminating in movements such as Dadaism and Futurism.⁴ Unable to give expression to the depth of their emotive responses to fascism through conventional forms of art-making, artists explored disruption, nonsense language, the non sequitur, the illogical and the fragment, seeking an anti-form that defied the previously sacrosanct logics of artistic convention.

In the 1970s, the term ‘performance art’ came to represent a departure from the ‘traditional materials of canvas, brush or chisel,’ a fundamental rejection of the art object, and a renunciation of art’s patriarchal lineage via a radical turn to the physical body.⁵ Artists used their bodies as canvas, taking their work into public spaces and forums and across the disciplinary borders of visual and conceptual art in search of anarchic forms that would engage more viscerally with the political ferment of the time – anti-war activism, the rise of feminism, the Civil Rights Movement. Bringing viewers into contact with the immediacy of the artist’s raced, classed, gendered and sexed body – unfiltered by facades of character – was also a direct means of troubling the rigidity of gender categories and sexual identities, and in this way performance art became imbricated with feminist and queer politics.

In the twenty-first century, increasingly driven by technology, performance art has encompassed works that do not solely rely on a living, breathing, performing body. In recognition of this added layer of interdisciplinarity, and of the fact that the (un)finished artwork may be as much about process as product, performance art became more frequently referred to as ‘live art’ in the early 2000s – a term that has been taken up in the interdisciplinary context of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA), where this collection was initiated.

While the sensitivity of twentieth-century Euro-American performance art to its socio-political context is an important touchpoint in this study, it is also a counterpoint – for this collection situates experimental performance within a precolonial and decolonial African genealogy of ritual, ruptures and experimentality, refuting the notion that South African live art is a western import. It derives from a mode of performativity and political radicalism that is integral to African tradition and protest culture. Site specificity, ritualised performance and notions of embodiment have been central to South African cultural practices of healing, shamanism, mourning, initiation and celebration for centuries – certainly long before colonial contact.

Like the origins of live art, the terms ‘classical African performance’ and ‘African tradition’ – including their use here – ought to be approached critically, for they suggest a homogenous ‘Africanness’ when, in reality, the ancient performative practices of southern Africa (let alone the continent) are numerous, specific and unique, encompassing the traditions of the Nguni and Khoi-San peoples. Exploring the complexities of each of these lineages is not the work of this book, but of critical importance to this research is an understanding that the characteristics and iconography of contemporary South African live art long predate the emergence of ‘live art’ as a label, tracing back, through the complex entanglements and encounters of colonialism and apartheid, to ancient traditions and performative modes. Both ‘live art’ and ‘performance art’ are used in this book to refer to experimental and often radically transgressive performative works, and ‘classical African performance’ to refer to indigenous practices, but with cognisance of the inadequacy of any one term to hold a multiplicity of forms and to convey the intricacies of South Africa’s performance heritage.

LINEAGE

The role and involvement of the audience has been a significant dimension of African performance from classical tradition through to contemporary live art. Immersion, improvisation and participation can be traced back to the San trance dance recorded in rock art paintings dating back thousands of years.⁶ The fluidity of what we now identify as distinct and separate disciplines was similarly characteristic of early communal performance, where music, dance and visual art were incorporated into social and spiritual rituals. The embeddedness of performance in daily life on the continent has also been widely observed through the period of colonisation and into independence.⁷ In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes:

In the colonial world, the emotional sensitivity of the native is kept on the surface of his skin like an open sore which flinches from the caustic agent; and the psyche shrinks back, obliterates itself and finds outlet in muscular demonstrations which have caused certain very wise men to say that the native is a hysterical type … we see the native’s emotional sensibility exhausting itself in dances which are more or less ecstatic. This is why any study of the colonial world should take into consideration the phenomena of the dance …⁸

Under colonial rule, the often-violent imposition of European culture impelled classical African dance and ritual to develop along new lines of improvisation and hybridisation. But these adaptions took shape with a degree of self-reflexivity indicative of Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of ‘colonial mimicry’: in the slippages that occur in the colonised’s ‘not quite’ imitation of the coloniser, there is an ‘ambivalence’ which gives rise to the possibility of agency and subversion.⁹

The musical and dance form isicathimiya is a good example of an extremely fluid form that developed out of this complex interplay between culture and artistic innovation under constraint. It derives from the intricate rhythmic structures of extensive and extended dance forms prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the traditional Zulu war dance indlamu. Unable to perform these spatially free forms in confined migrant hostel spaces, workers recreated the dance, transforming the characteristically loud and emphatic stamp of classical Zulu dance to a soft withdrawn leg. The quietness and subtlety of this ‘dance of the cat’ – from the isiZulu word ukucathama meaning ‘to tiptoe’ or ‘walk stealthily’ – was also as a result of rehearsing at night when other workers were asleep.¹⁰ And so the isicathimiya was born, and later made internationally popular by the choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

This deconstruction is starker, still, in the Nazareth Baptist Church’s amalgamation of Christianity, Zulu tradition and Scottish dance attire. At the Church’s annual festivals, young men dance as Scotsmen (isikoshi), dressed in ‘tartan like-skirts and pith helmets,’ in a tradition that dates back to the early 1900s.¹¹ Isaiah Shembe founded the Church near Durban in 1910, purportedly because of ‘the mission churches’ rejection of converts wearing African traditional attire.’¹² Magnus Echtler notes that Shembe’s choice of Scottish dance uniform was likely inspired by ‘the Highland regiments of the British Empire,’ although its place in a dance of worship remains open to much speculation.¹³ Likewise, scholarly interpretations of the dance span ‘the range from resistance through symbolic inversion to the enculturation of Christianity, or even the transformation of a military tradition into religiously motivated nonviolence.’¹⁴ Occupying an ambiguous point between subversion and appropriation, the isikoshi dance is perhaps Bhabha’s mimicry writ large.

South Africa has a long history of protest marches and rallies abundant with performances of all kinds, whether in the form of communal expression through chants, singing, the intricately synchronised toyi-toyi, or individuals in breakaway performances that make use of costume or naked flesh, visual images or spontaneous poetry.¹⁵ Peter Horn writes in Theatre and Change in South Africa that, in the 1980s,

various cultural forms (music, dance, poetry, drama) appeared both within the context of political and trade union meetings and in the form of ‘cultural’ events with a clear political connotation. Elements of this culture were taken from ‘traditional’ culture and its transformation in an African ghetto (traditional Xhosa songs and dances) but also from ‘foreign traditional’ cultures, such as the marimba players.¹⁶

Importantly, tradition is not merely excavated in contemporary live art, but subverted, reimagined and distorted in complex and ambiguous ways, and with a great degree of self-consciousness. Pesa’s Limelight on Rites (alluded to above) and Samson Mudzunga’s burial performances in Limpopo in the 1990s probe the conflict between urban and rural rituals around death, and the displacement of the black body in the commodification of funeral ceremonies. In Uncles and Angels, Nelisiwe Xaba and Mocke J. van Veuren reference the Zulu Reed Dance to probe the exploitation of the female body that is embedded in patriarchal tradition and phallocentric conceptions of nationhood. Athi-Patra Ruga’s early work Ilulwane recreates the Xhosa initiation ritual while interrogating the models of masculinity and sexuality that it reinforces.

All of these western-derived practices and indigenous forms of embodiment, hybridity, immersion and protest serve as points of lineage and determinants of character, scope and purpose in the evolution of contemporary live art in South Africa.

STREAMS OF INFLUENCE

In the section ‘Theatre and Performance’ of the Encyclopaedia of South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance (ESAT), Temple Hauptfleisch identifies two influences in the development of theatre:

The coming of European colonization in 1652 brought many new performance forms and introduced the notion of theatre (as a formal and distinctly separate social system) to the sub-continent. In consequence two performance systems developed: on the one hand there are the indigenous forms which were initially largely found within tribal context [sic], particularly in non-urban areas, but later developed a variety of more urbanized forms and styles … On the other hand, the European-style theatre that the Dutch, French, German and particularly British colonials introduced between 1790 to 1880 provided the basis for the formal theatre system in South Africa today.¹⁷

The reductiveness of Hauptfleisch’s categorisation belies the reality that traditional modes of performance evolved, not in tandem with European forms, but in spite of, and in reaction to, the exertion (and sometimes brute force) of colonial power. Nevertheless, Hauptfleisch’s dual categorisation is useful in that it offers a broad-strokes understanding of two central strands of influence in the development of live art in South Africa: experimental twentieth-century Euro-American performance art and its intersection with classical African performance and protest culture. The former is observable in some of the early productions of the Cape Town-based Glass Theatre, and in the work of artists like Chris Pretorius, Peet Pienaar and John Nankin – artists who, influenced by performance art developments in Europe and America, staged their own localised rebellions against the political status quo, the realism of plot-driven theatre and the conventions of visual art.

The latter is observable in the practices of Boyzie Cekwana, Robyn Orlin, Nelisiwe Xaba, Tracey Rose and Mamela Nyamza, through to Albert Khoza, Chuma Sopotela and Sethembile Msezane – all of whom evoke elements of traditional African ritual, but in conversation with (and always engaging in a deconstruction of) western modes of theatre-making, dance and performance art that have informed their education and practice.

In order to engage with the richness of contemporary live art in a postcolonial, postapartheid South Africa, as this book calls on readers to do, its history and multiplicity of influences must be understood as traversing the full range and multiple intersections, contradictions and hybridisations of these indigenous art forms and western-derived performative practices. The works of the artists discussed in Acts of Transgression exemplify these wide-ranging influences.

THE CONTEXT

The idea for a collection of essays exploring contemporary live art in South Africa was conceived, and the book itself developed and edited, at the ICA – an interdisciplinary arts institute, formerly known as GIPCA, based in the University of Cape Town’s Humanities Faculty.¹⁸ The nature of the work that the ICA supports and engages in – from public lectures and symposiums to fellowships and festivals – is experimental, innovative and collaborative, moving across and between disciplinary boundaries. This is the context in which Acts of Transgression arose in late 2016; it is also the environment in which the book took shape throughout 2017 and 2018, and which has invariably shaped the book.

References to the ICA are made throughout Acts of Transgression, in particular to the ICA Live Art Festival, which has provided opportunities for contributors to this book to experience, first-hand, a number of significant live art works. First held in 2012, and thereafter in 2014, 2017 and 2018, the Festival has featured pioneering artists whose practices have emerged from an array of disciplines – established artists, such as Warona Seane, Tossie van Tonder, John Nankin and Nelisiwe Xaba, as well as younger and (at the time) lesser-known artists, such as Richard September, Spirit Mba and Themba Mbuli. Contributors have, of course, gone beyond the pool of artists featured at the Festival.

The answer to ‘why this collection?’ is, in part, that no text about South African live art exists. Performances have existed as fleeting moments in time, sometimes captured on film, but with scarce written critique of the themes that artists are mining, or analysis of the critical thinking that goes into curating experimental works. Furthermore, the study of the interdisciplinary nature of live art presents an opportunity to disrupt disciplinary silos in art education – an interrogation more pressing now than ever, particularly in response to calls to decolonise the institution. In the early period of South Africa’s democracy, troubling academic parochialism was largely a matter of introducing new content to art curricula inherited from colonial models. As South Africa begins to face questions that were avoided in the early 1990s, not least questions of material equity and land, art-makers are searching for ways in which the nuances and paradoxes inherent in these issues may be expressed and given form. The field prompts us to question ‘pure’ art forms, such as theatre and dance, as well as the object-centred visual art form and archaic musical traditions that linked, for example, melody with music. Artists are questioning these narrow categories and opening up new spaces for experimentation and new ways of looking. By inviting a closer relationship with events unfolding outside of the sterile civilities of a white cube gallery or the safety of the proscenium stage, they provide experiences that trouble and sometimes shock a certain presumed logic.

But the value of live art is not only as witness to, or engagement with, conflict. Its multidisciplinary approach characterises an artistic consciousness that is restlessly in search of a way to arrive at something that remains elusive. Its feeling is urgent, risky, edgy, provocative. It is colourful not just in image but in content – artists’ untrammelled, idiosyncratic points of view eschew the trappings that might render a performance fit for easy or feel-good consumption. In many instances the results are unpredictable. Indeed, the hallmark of much live art is the integrity of a performance that may have taken months to prepare, but that is open to anything in the event of its happening.

Live artists also defy the logic of commerce. Commercial art enterprises (galleries, fairs, auction houses) have supported and sustained many artists. But they have also sucked away at some of the core impulses of why we make art. By stepping outside of commercial spaces and unsettling the economies and socio-political relations they govern, live artists put themselves at great risk – aesthetically and politically, but particularly financially. The fact that a performance cannot easily be bought, bubble wrapped and hung bears testimony to this.

The twin impulses to find an (anti-)form that resists the commercialisation of art, and that mirrors and responds to the irrationality and turbulence of its setting make live art a compelling, even necessary, mode for the expression of contemporary complexities. In these times of extremity, to place the responsibility for acts of terror against vulnerable people on individuals only – often political leaders like Donald Trump – is something of an illusion. Because millions of ordinary people put them in power. Racism and fascism, sexism and homophobia – the -isms and phobias by which pernicious regimes become known – are what ordinary people do to other ordinary people. And yet, an awareness of how we think, and why, begins to dislodge something deep in the consciousness. By interfering with accepted logics, live art in South Africa forces us to scrutinise our own constructions and to be vigilant.

THE TITLE

The post-rainbowism moment in South Africa could perhaps be traced along two key lines: a growing cynicism in nation-building and the protection afforded by state; and the beginnings of a dislodging of established systems based on systemic prejudice. The former was made most visible in the aftermath of the Marikana massacre and the exposés of Nkandla and state capture, and the latter by the eruption of the Rhodes Must Fall movement. But the fall of Rhodes, in its weight of bronze and symbolism, has only concretised – and given us a more pointed language to describe – a reality that South African artists were already articulating: once-stable systems and institutions, master narratives, unquestioned forms of memorialisation and government development plans no longer account for who and where we are. As Sarah Nuttall suggests in her chapter, we have exhausted our faith in facts (a faith perhaps always precarious) to speak to and for us; it is emotions and psychic energies that enable us ‘to trace the meanings of a time.’ More particularly, this collection contends that it is the emotions and energies forcefully articulated in the works of contemporary South African live artists that hold an account of our unfolding now.

The ‘transgressions’ of this book’s title – like the art form to which it refers – offers numerous interpretations. At its most immediate level, it references the provocativeness of live art – a rejection of disciplinary boundaries and conventional rules of art-making. The artworks explored in this collection take the form of live and filmed performances, protest action, interventions and installations that draw on the disciplines of visual art, dance, African traditional healing and ritual, photography, film and fashion, amongst many others. The title is also a reference to the transgression of boundaries between the aesthetic and the political, performativity and everyday acts, as well as the inclusions and exclusions of archive.

The insights offered and arguments forwarded in this collection also trouble, subvert and explode the essentialising discourses and categories of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationhood and nationalism. In doing so, forms that hold these subversions are made porous, and transgressions emerge here too. Lieketso Dee Mohoto-wa Thaluki, Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga and Mwenya B. Kabwe, in particular, infuse their analyses with deeply personal accounts of the impressions that particular works have had on them. Introspection thus takes shape as a specific methodology – a counter to the clinical distance of academic discourse and an extension of the idea that emotions and emotiveness, perhaps more so than ever before, serve as an instructive gauging point of these complex and uncertain times.

THE BOOK

The artists examined here, although in excess of 25 and certainly a cross section of contemporary artists in South Africa, by no means form an exhaustive list. Nor is the collection an exhaustive exposition of where live art is at in the country. This is owing to the vision for the book – a rigorous conceptual engagement with, rather than a chronological overview of, live art in South Africa. The collection is principally concerned with conceptual underpinnings – specifically, understanding live art against shifting notions of crisis. This is the vital thread that binds these chapters: artistic agency within a time of political urgency.

The four parts of the book are intended to direct the reader towards a number of key themes. Part One helps us to take the measure of live art in South Africa against a backdrop of contemporary complexities – the ways in which artists draw from and respond to this milieu, laying bare its incongruities and iniquities. Nomusa Makhubu’s chapter is an excavation of space and place – the still-contested, deeply segregated nature of Cape Town’s public spaces (exposed through the performative interventions of artists like Khanyisile Mbongwa, Buhlebezwe Siwani and Chuma Sopotela) and the profound sense of unbelonging experienced by the city’s black citizenry. Uncontainable emotion, in Makhubu’s study, is that of anger and frustration at a persisting geographical and psychological placelessness.

In Catherine Boulle’s analysis, the anarchism of live art is viewed through the lens of pioneering performance artist Steven Cohen, whose dissonant works offer profoundly political interpretations in this time of turbulence. Boulle probes whether Cohen’s disruptive interventions might move beyond rupturing oppressive ideologies of the past and gesture towards a future in which violent systems of subjugation have loosened their hold.

As noted above, Sarah Nuttall brings ‘affective structures’ to bear on her study of live art – and offers these as an ‘integral and visceral dimension of the grammar of the political.’ Her concern with how we might curate performative practices of disruption and ambivalence, such as those of Dean Hutton and Mohau Modisakeng,¹⁹ reverberates into Jay Pather’s probing of key conceptual issues associated with curating and ‘taking care of’ the immediacy and spontaneity of live art in contemporary South Africa. A way forward, Pather suggests, is to conceptualise the role of the curator as the creator of open and enabling platforms where disparate issues are served with fluid, porous structures, divested of an imposed curatorial order or sensibility.

The chapters comprising Part Two proceed from an interest in the black female body as a site of trauma and contested histories, but also of resistance and the emergence of new forms of expression. Same Mdluli’s study of the visual and linguistic codes by which the black female body becomes ‘knowable’ and consumable is a provocative exploration of performativity beyond the stage, and even beyond live art as we know it. In their unscriptedness and non-structure, these public interventions and acts of disruption and protest start to reframe our understanding of the ‘live-ness’ of live art.

Lieketso Dee Mohoto-wa Thaluki approaches the work of Chuma Sopotela from her position as a black woman grappling with the complex live art practice of a fellow black woman artist, and with a particular interest in the visceral corporeality of Sopotela’s work. This emerges, Mohoto-wa Thaluki reveals, from Sopotela’s methods of ‘situatedness’ – the manner in which she excavates and then embodies her contemporary social context. Cognisant of the ineffability of Sopotela’s work, Mohoto-wa Thaluki’s speculative exploration defies the knowability that comes through definitive interpretations.

Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga, like Mdluli, is interested in the relationship between protest and performance art, but particularly in its linguistic and embodied manifestations. Activist art, Msimanga contends, performs trauma doubly to articulate a new language as an emergency and an emergence. Msimanga’s mining of the language (and non-language) of trauma is taken up in Gabrielle Goliath’s exploration of the ways in which traumatised black bodies – routinely subjected to forms of physical, ontological and structural violence – might resist the homogenising erasure that such violation threatens. Goliath explores Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama’s ritualistic performances and applications of invocation which render the absent visible and the silenced heard; a profound realisation of agency that works against systemic and bodily violation.

In Part Three, Katlego Disemelo, Bettina Malcomess and Alan Parker think through the nature of the performative and the shifting composition of archive. Disemelo argues that online self-styling and image-making practices that expose the absurdity of heteronormative gender and sexual identity categories are carefully curated performative acts. Moreover, these performances by FAKA, Umlilo and Albert ‘Ibokwe’ Khoza signal the emergence of a radical queer archive that reconfigures traditional conceptions of archive in our increasingly digitised and visual culture. Parker is similarly engaged in an interrogation of archive – in particular, the embodied archive – as a means of communing with (and contesting) inherited knowledge and behaviours. He considers performances by Gavin Krastin, Sello Pesa and Igshaan Adams that reimagine and subvert rituals concerned with the dead in order to rethink knowledge of the past, and ourselves, in the present.

Through the works of FAKA, Dean Hutton and Athi-Patra Ruga, Malcomess offers a response to the reductive discourse of the queer body as a site of lack. This is a response premised on an exploration of the ‘emptying out’ of gesture, as Malcomess terms it, in order to reveal the language of queer performance as an articulation, not of multiply inscribed oppressions, but of the conditions and limitations of the queer body’s becoming or coming into visibility.

The final part of this collection looks backwards in order to, or perhaps in the hope of, moving forward: how do we remember our past and conceptualise our present in a manner that might bring into being a revitalised future? The destabilising of historical narratives is of critical interest to both Khwezi Gule and Andrew J. Hennlich. Via the works of Sikhumbuzo Makandula, Buhlebezwe Siwani and Sethembile Msezane, amongst others, Gule problematises the commemorative and memorial culture of post-1994 South Africa, and asks how we might instantiate a counter-narrative of memory and belonging. Hennlich reads Athi-Patra Ruga’s immense body of work The Future White Women of Azania against the revolutionary and redemptive possibilities of Walter Benjamin’s model of history, and perceives Ruga as principally engaged in uniting and reconfiguring South Africa’s past and present ‘in an urgency to reframe the now.’

In Mwenya B. Kabwe’s hands, this interest in the imprint of historical narratives on our present subjectivities becomes forward looking. Kabwe explores Afrofuturism as a deconstruction of westernised, colonial systems of knowing, probing the ways in which Africa might imagine itself in, and into, the future as a strategy to know differently; ‘to radically disturb’ the politics of knowledge. What possibilities might we bring into being, Kabwe asks, if ‘we start from the premise that we know; that we are full of knowing?’

For Massa Lemu, one answer to how we might shift reductive historical discourses – particularly essentialist art-historical discourses that have homogenised and anonymised notions of an African collectivist past – lies in the artistic practices of collectives Gugulective and iQhiya. Their performance interventions, Lemu argues, are demonstrative of a generative, subject-centred, decolonial praxis that works against racial and gendered subjugation and gestures towards ‘the possibility of free and autonomous black subjectivities who determine their own identity and social reality.’

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We return once more to the idea that recurs throughout this collection, and indeed in the political economy of postapartheid South Africa – an overflow of emotion that is in excess of language. Transgression, the arguments collected here would seem to suggest, is the inevitable by-product of this overflow. Feelings of rage, frustration, placelessness, violation and exclusion that can no longer be held or contained in our country spill out onto the streets, assault our consciences, confront our bodies, challenge our notions of community and public, destabilise our knowledge of past and present, our visions of the future, and what it means to know at all.

An innate, perhaps inescapable, human response to such instability is the compulsion to find meaning, identify causes, predict outcomes, and seize upon certainties. But in the performative acts of transgression that we call ‘live art’ there are no such certitudes; no promise of closure or resolution. Live art, experimental art-making in front of our eyes, tries on and tries out new ways of seeing and being in the world, feeling its way forwards (sideways, backwards) into unknown spaces, stepping outside the boundaries of what is known and comfortable as it stakes out new territories and vocabularies of expression. Artists trouble our worldviews and test our ability to function without familiar coordinates, chipping away at false certainties. The effects are often disorienting, but vital, it would seem, if we intend to do more than dream of a fair, critical and robust society from the safe remove of intractable ideological standpoints. So it is that this study of contemporary live art in South Africa – the first of its kind – is both timeous and imperative.

1. Passages in this introduction first appeared in the Daily Maverick. See Jay Pather, ‘Op-Ed: Live Art 2017 Reflects the Crises that are Besetting the World,’ Daily Maverick, 16 February 2017, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-02-16-op-ed-live-art-2017-reflects-the-crises-that-are-besetting-the-world/#.Wu-D1tNubMI.

2. For a discussion of ‘the response to the extremities of a failed democracy’ expressed as ‘spillage, interruption, and overflow,’ see also Jay Pather, ‘Negotiating the Postcolonial Black Body as a Site of Paradox,’ Theater Journal 47, no. 1 (2017): 143–152, doi: 10.1215/01610775-3710477.

3. Brandon Hamber and Richard Wilson, ‘Symbolic Closure through Memory, Reparation and Revenge in Post-Conflict Societies,’ Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 1 (2002): 36, accessed 15 January 2018, doi: 10.1080/14754830110111553.

4. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present , 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011).

5. Goldberg, Performance Art , 152.

6. Temple Hauptfleisch, ‘South African Theatre: Some Major Trends of Past Developments,’ in Words and Worlds. African Writing, Literature, and Society: A Commemorative Publication in Honour of Eckhard Breitinger , eds. Susan Arndt and Katrin Berndt (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007), 58. See also: J.D. Lewis-Williams and D.G. Pearce, San Spirituality: Roots, Expression, and Social Consequences (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2004), 81–108.

7. See for instance: Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982); Peter Larlham, Black Theater, Dance, and Ritual in South Africa (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985); David B. Coplan, In Township Tonight!: Three Centuries of South African Black City Music and Theatre , 2nd ed. (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2007); Barbara Thompson, ‘Rituals of Healing,’ University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, accessed 5 January 2018, https://africa.uima.uiowa.edu/chapters/arts-of-healing/rituals-of-healing/ .

8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth , trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963), 55–56.

9. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,’ October 28 (1984): 125–133, accessed 1 June 2017, doi: 10.2307/778467.

10. These descriptions of indlamu and isicathimiya were first given in Jay Pather’s verbal response at the discussion entitled ‘Opera in a Post-Eurocentric Globalized World’ hosted by the University of Cape Town’s Archive & Public Culture Research Initiative on 16 October 2014.

11. Magnus Echtler, ‘Scottish Warriors in KwaZulu-Natal: Cultural Hermeneutics of the Scottish Dance ( Isikoshi ) in the Nazareth Baptist Church, South Africa,’ in Africa in Scotland, Scotland in Africa: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Hybridities , eds. Afe Adogame and Andrew Lawrence (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 326.16

12. Echtler, ‘Scottish Warriors in KwaZulu-Natal,’ 327.

13. Echtler, ‘Scottish Warriors in KwaZulu-Natal,’ 332.

14. Echtler, ‘Scottish Warriors in KwaZulu-Natal,’ 326.

15. Toyi-toyi is a South African dance, often performed at protests, thought to have been introduced into South Africa by African National Congress exiles returning from military training in Zimbabwe. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘toyi-toyi,’ Oxford Living Dictionaries, accessed 10 January 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/toyi-toyi .

16. Peter Horn, ‘What is a Tribal Dress? The " Imbongi (Praise Singer) and the People’s Poet." Reactivation of a Tradition in the Liberation Struggle,’ Theatre and Change in South Africa , eds. Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996), 117.

17. Temple Hauptfleisch, ‘Theatre and Performance,’ Encyclopaedia of South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance (ESAT), accessed 5 January 2018, http://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/South_African_Theatre/Overview .

18. GIPCA was established in 2008 with a fixed-period grant from the Donald Gordon Foundation. Thereafter, the Institute continued its work as a result of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and under a new name – the Institute for Creative Arts. The name change came into effect at the launch of the ICA on 5 April 2016.

19. Dean Hutton is a genderqueer artist who uses the non-binary pronouns ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘theirs.’ This is reflected in the discussions of Hutton’s work throughout the book.

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