ETD Collection

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/104


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Subject: search.filters.subject.Performance art

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    The forgotten: The ability of the bodyto carry the stories of many
    (2018) Khalishwayo
    Performance has long been a method for telling the stories of people. Through the compassionate engagement of finding the stories of other people, the researcher as performer begins to truthfully realise the stories of others. This study is an exploration of performance as research as a method of finding, holding, unfolding and giving voice to the stories of the marginalised. The creative research, through performance as the written word, performance as the body, performance as ritual theatre, and performance as healing, sought to find ways to give voice to the voiceless. Within this context, this research focussed specifically on the young people’s stories, including this researcher’s story, about being part of FeesMustFall movement, being the subject that gave rise to FeesMustFall movement, and being the forgotten story during the FeesMustFall movement. The creative research sought to grapple with the stories of FeesMustFall movement, to capture the uncaptured stories, to give voice to the voiceless, and to explore through performance as research what the underlying experiences, relationships and psychological condition was that gave rise to FeesMustFall movement, and what the stories have become for those who were deeply impacted by the meaning of the movement and the actions of the movement itself. The research sought to undertake this investigation and present its findings through performance. This part of the creative research serves to reflect on the performance as research and to capture the voices through a performative form of writing. The study seeks to demonstrate the power of performance as a means to knowledge and emancipation. Key Words: FeesMustFall, forgotten stories, performance as research, body, body as performance
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    The lamppost: a metaphorical reflection on archival absences and presences
    (2016-03-03) Khoza, Bongani
    My research intends to appropriate and recast Jacques Derrida’s ideas by seeking to interpret the written text as supplementary to photographic images. I use a close reading of Judith Coullie’s introductory text to Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography (2006) to explore Santu Mofokeng’s representation of his biography and autobiography. Through selected works by Mofokeng, I highlight photographic ways and writing modes of expressing and locating his voice, drawing on the artist’s own subjective reality, memory and metaphor. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in conjunction with the introductory text to Selves in Question serve to provide much historical evidence and contexts to the complexities of writing a personal narrative in an exploration of freedom within the confines of oppression. I nevertheless acknowledge that some narratives are heavily dependent on a collaborative relationship. The negotiated different moments and perspectives that make up various presented narratives are born from spaces and places that act as intersections within the private and public in a constant state of stasis and movement..
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    Performing mess: the generative potential of disorder in institutions of order
    (2016-03-03) Lubinsky, Talya
    Beginning a research project at the Johannesburg City Library in 2013 was the catalyst for the body of work presented here for my Masters dissertation. Since it had been closed for renovations, and reopened in 2012, the Library was filled with boxes of books waiting to be ordered and put away, and old furniture piled up in empty rooms. There was a tension between the structure of the library, an institution whose purpose is to order and classify knowledge, and the state of its contents, which were disorderly and messy. This paradoxical relationship between mess and order is one which I have mobilised in my practical work, and other case studies upon which I have drawn. Through them, I argue that the tension between mess and order can be a productive space for knowledge/artistic production. I look at sites like the Johannesburg City Library as examples that present a strategy for display that I have found to be useful in my practical work. These strategies include presenting piles or heaps of papers, which prompt the viewer to sort through, pick something up, or find something amongst the ‘mess’. I use the term ‘serendipity’ to describe the experience of ‘coming across’ something on one’s own. The serendipitous experience is one that gives the discovered object an air of specialness, something that ‘I have found, that therefore must have some special relationship to me’. A presentation by Shireen Ally on her paper, Material Remains illustrates this point through an anecdote she shared, about the neglected archives of the administration of the former Bantustan, KwaNgane. In my own work I mobilise the fragment as an important tool for freeing text of being bound to one specific meaning. A text read as a singular phrase, can adopt many meanings, often personal, in that they are imagined by the viewer. By freeing text of its contextual ‘order’, one opens possibility for another kind of serendipity, one that is formed through the implication that a piece of text can relate to a viewer in a very personal way. I invoke the theory of performativity in relation to display strategies of mess and fragmentation. A performative speech act is one that changes the ontological status of the subject that is being implicated by the speech act. Because fragmented pieces of text, displayed ‘messily’ do not have prescribed categories (meanings), they enable the viewer to enact his or her own meaning-making. Through this, the fragment comes into being as part of the given category; the ontological status of that phrase is changed through he act of categorising. This reminds us that all categories are in fact constructed and are not inherent to the subject of classification. Here, the form of the Rolodex as a device that holds both my written and practical research embodies the theory of performativity as it allows for pages to be taken out and put back, can be read from any point, facilitating non linearity and fragmentary text. Paradoxically, the Rolodex also performs the function of an ordering mechanism.
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    The performer as shaman: an auto ethnographic performance as research project
    (2015) Sakaria, Jacob Jacks
    This is an auto ethnographic project in which I explore how my personal and cultural narratives can be used for healing and transformation through a theatre making process. I look at performance as an object of making meaning while placing myself at the centre of the study as the subject of this research. During this process, I was looking at discovering a personal theatre making language with an aim of finding my voice. The outcome of my journey was an experimental creative project titled Eenganga which was performed in an alternative and nontraditional form in terms of space, text and the overall theatre making process. This study is an account of a journey that initially began as a performance ethnography project which collected cultural narratives of black urban traditional healers from Katutura, Windhoek, Namibia. There was an internal and an external data collection process. My body as a site of knowledge was the main research instrument.
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    Performing media
    (2015-02-13) Osso, Tamara
    Catherine Wood describes our society today as an entanglement between languages, time, space, intimacy, drama and diversity (Wood 2012: 10). Ian Chambers affirms that the notion of communicating or recounting with greater multi-­‐dimensionality, enacting or displaying more than one perspective at the same time, seems to better facilitate the complexity involved in communication itself (Chambers 2000: 25). Interaction in today’s context is therefore a complex experience that can position many modes of engagement in the same moment. The following dissertation explores the process of translating more than one visual language – here, painting and performance. It explores how the interdisciplinary nature of visual languages can interpret experience as multifaceted, lending greater perspective to concepts, issues and subject matter. Walter Benjamin suggests that this is only possible because languages “are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express” (Benjamin 1969: 72). Benjamin’s text introduces the idea of translation between languages as a mode, a natural way of interaction. I will use his concept of translation to explain my interest in the conflation between painting and performance, and how this process reflects on a particular experience our current context.