Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs)
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Item The Historical Contribution of Black Musicians to Orchestral Classical Music around Johannesburg and the Implications for Cultural Policy(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-07) Bokaba, Shadrack; Pyper, BrettThis study documents the historical contribution of black musicians to classical music in Johannesburg. It places the spotlight on South Africa’s cultural policy (explicitly or implicitly) over the last century and provides ongoing reflections on this period. The thesis analyses the conditions, within and beyond the prevailing policy that enabled black orchestral musicians to practice this art form. By exploring the complex origins of these practices, the study suggests that the dichotomous thinking about culture as either Eurocentric or Afro-centric may be misplaced due to the possibility that Western classical music may have become part of black South African cultural life as a result of having been translated, transferred, hybridised or acculturated. In addition, the study places the government’s arm’s length funding model under scrutiny and finds this approach continues to be applied inconsistently since it was first presented in the White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage (1996). As both a classical musician and orchestral administrator, the author has lived part of the history described in the thesis and, through analysis, attempts to establish a dialogue between professional experience and what scholarly reflection can do to that practice. He presents narratives through insider lenses, with carefully selected interviewees, and interrogates situations and sites over a century-long period of the history of black orchestral music practice in South Africa.Item A Deep Divide in South African Art Music: Locating the Voice of the Performer(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-07) Nay, Malcom; Olwage, GrantThis essay traces the origins of a “deep divide” (Fokkens 2014: 8) that developed between two central figures in the South African compositional world, originally in the 1980s around accusations of the cultural appropriation of African music. The conflict became entrenched amongst composers, musicologists and performers and has pervaded much of the research and dialogue that has taken place in the intervening years. This came to a head when a selection of South African composers was selected to present works to be performed at a concert at the Juilliard School in New York in 2014. The ensuing fallout characterised the vicious nature of the musical aspersions that eventually degenerated into direct personal conflict. My role as a performer, during this time, had to take into account this unpleasant environment as I had direct interactions with many of the figures involved, often working towards performances and recordings of their music. In more recent times, support for the arts in South Africa has declined significantly serving to intensify the struggle for access to funding, resources, and performance opportunities, exacerbated by a diminishing government mandate for general arts support and the devastating impact of Covid-19. The essay recounts an in-depth personal narrative and performance analysis of my experience when preparing Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph’s Pendulum for Piano and Orchestra (2010). It finds that while an ideal philosophical approach to preparing a performance is commendable, it is not always achievable when confronted with the practical realities of a musical performance.Item The Steel Fig Leaf: Exploring the Grotesque Ambivalence of the Male Body and Its Masculinities through Sculpture, Performance Art, and Theatre(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-09) Genovese, Nicola; Doherty, ChristoThe practice-based research described in this thesis sought to develop imagery in visual and performative artworks capable of engendering and embodying new perspectives on the male body and performed masculinities. The project involved three phases: pure sculpture, sculpture activation using the male body in performance, and theatre performance, the latter focusing on northern Italian masculinities. The key concepts to emerge from the investigation were ambivalence, parody, and the aesthetic category of the grotesque. During the research, I developed a sculptural practice characterised by a craft approach and deploying heterogeneous materials – including textiles, a medium historically associated with the fabric art movement and feminism. As far as performative practice is concerned, my first approach was to challenge the rules of the white cube by attempting to transform spectators into an audience. My next approach was to engage with the specificities of the theatre as a performance context and the challenges for a fine artist working on a stage. The development of my practice was supported by theoretical reflection resulting from a critical engagement with feminism, queer discourse and masculinities studies, culminating in a partial affirmation of the direction taken by the new materialist strand of feminism. This research approaches the male body and its grotesque features through the figure of the flaccid penis as the starting point for questioning the dominant theoretical paradigm of the male body, the phallus, and violence. The materiality of my sculptures and performances addresses the entanglement of biology and culture, challenging the hegemony of the social constructivist approach in contemporary art. By exposing and highlighting the varieties of Italian masculinities, this research critiques the tendency in current academic discourse to depict straight white men as a monolithic category of oppressors. The imagery I develop through my sculptures and performance exposes behavioural, aesthetic, and bodily nuances that gesture towards the complexity occluded by contemporary understandings of masculinity.Item Wayfaring stone: Learning to think with stone, as vibrant matter, in the post-extractive urban terrains of the Witwatersrand ridgeline(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-02) Stone-Johnson, Brigitta; Le Roux, Hannah; Andrew, DavidJohannesburg is a stony city that exists because of endless interplays between below and above. Johannesburg is a city of earth, rock, rubble and dust. It is a mining city in a state of post-extractive fragmentation. The fragmented wildness troubles all of its materiality. The smooth and inert bubble over exposes the decomposition created by what has been taken/extracted from it. As its infrastructure weathers and fragments, the city is often read as a wasteland or ruin, where human agency has failed to smooth over and rebuilt in ever increasingly short cycles. The local and global environmental implications of such material attitudes are threatening the long-term ability of the earth to sustain human and other life. The issues of the Anthropocene are as much material attitudes as they are issues of extraction, consumption and waste. Suppose shifting perspective: from imagining humans as separate from the terrain toward thinking of ourselves as an aggregation of matter, and stony matter as an independent actant, co-labouring in urban terrain formation. In that case, these weathering, fragmentation and aggregation processes can be viewed as vital agencies of stony matter. This shift in perspective would enable us to remain present within the extractive terrain. It enables us to think of the post-extractive urban terrain not as a ruin, but as a feral urban ecology growing and entangling vital stony agencies with other than human matter and human actions alike in the ongoing process of making the becoming-urban terrain. In many ways, Johannesburg exemplifies the 'Anthrop' in the current Anthropocene age. It is the triumph of culture over nature; testament to the planetary impact of material extraction. The consequences are exemplified in its urban terrain, dotted with urban archipelagos of residue that are toxic to the bodies that inhabit them. These islands span in scale from the small sites of waste dumping in urban parks and open mining lands, to the vast scale of scarification left by gold mining and industrial decay within the city. Unlike many cities, where such industrial ruination and extraction are far removed from the city, the location of the gold-bearing reef acts as the catalyst for the formation of the city. Sites of mining residue and industrial decay are situated in close proximity to the city centre and drove the romanticisation of the northern slopes as urban forest, and the use of southern slopes as wasteland. Besides its extractive material past, the city of Johannesburg is located within one of the oldest sections of the earth's crust, the Kaap-Vaal Craton. The central Witwatersrand ridgeline, which runs east-west within the centre of the city, has outcrops of some of the oldest rocks on earth and forms the continental watershed between the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Its extractive residues and material attitudes have significance within a broader discussion concerning city-making as human geo-writing, and its climatic impact is of interest within the Anthropocene. Despite its deep geological and mineral context, the city of Johannesburg has, within the post-apartheid spatial discourse, often been framed as if its geological and atmospheric terrain did not exist. The language used in writings about the city includes descriptors that frame Johannesburg as an immaterial city composed only of its human inhabitants, such as 'the transient city' 1, uitval-grond (remainder, non-place) 2 , the restless city 3 , necropolis and elusive metropolis 4 . These descriptors stem from a dualist material perspective of urban terrains and take a centrist humanist position suggesting that humans are the only agents for change in an inert material terrain. Spatial discourse applies philosophy to the built environment practices including built form and design in architecture, together with urban, town and regional planning, and urban design. Within the context of Johannesburg, through writing in the post-apartheid space, spatial discourse has become critically entangled with the social sciences. Within such spatial discourses, issues of urban terrains, extraction, degradation and materiality are often relegated to the margins, despite their impact on urban inhabitants and epoch-altering consequences for climate and future geological strata. Research risks becoming increasingly abstracted, and ungrounded in the living and active world in which the city's inhabitants move through and touch. In this work I respond to issues of surface, materiality and our human impact on urban terrains in the age of the Anthropocene, and question how spatial thinking contributes to issues of material denial and the degradation of urban terrains. Given Johannesburg's mining and deep geological context, I have chosen to work with the materiality of stone as a representative of human/material dualisms, which I see present here. Stony matters’ contribution to human societal formation is one of the most complex material alliances of the anthropocentric age, and connects momentary human actions to planet-altering effects produced by the complex web of alliances, traces, and matter flows facilitating modern city-making. In framing humans and stony matter as co-labours in terrain formation, I consider stony matter to be a trans-corporeal material, spanning in scale from granular to geological. The term trans-corporeal derives from feminist posthuman theory that says matter exists in multiple states and scales5 that span between bodies (collectivities) of human and other than human alike. Applied to the materiality of stone within this context, I considered stony matter to include the geological terrain as a biosphere. I imagine an urban, geological and ecological whole that includes wild stone in situ within 'urban archipelagos', which protrude into the city grid, filled with human-made, connective infrastructure, rubble and piles. I suggest that the stony matter present here collaborates as agglomerative agents in the formation of urban terrain. Furthermore, I consider weathering, rubbling and aggregating as agencies of stony matter that act in the ebbing and flowing process - rather than being static, or moving towards an ultimate ruinous end. I consider the process of weathering and gathering as relational processes for knowing stones' agency, accessible to the human temporal range through bodily encounters with the materials. I draw on the field of environmental humanities in this work, as it also incorporates feminist posthuman theory and new material theory. It emerges from a trans-disciplinary discussion that questions the human/matter and nature/culture duality implied within a cartesian understanding of matter. Creating a theoretical divide between living and non-living things. question this duality with their work on the posthuman. These collective theoretical positions critique the centrality of the human to act within the world and to forward a bio-centred egalitarianism that seeks to hold human and non-human social relationships as equally relevant in forming a response to issues of the Anthropocene. Posthuman studies propose a non-dualist understanding of the nature-culture binary and emphasise the self-organist forces of living matter. The defining features of Posthumanism take as their starting point, after Braidotti, that all matter is one (Monism), and that all matter is agentic and self-organising. The subject is not unitary but nomadic, and subjectivity includes relations with non-human others10. This implies that thinking is not the prerogative of humans alone, but includes non-human 'others', including stony matters subjectivity. I use the theory here to frame the relationship between humans, stony materials, and terrain. The focus is the nature and culture of stony materials as a vitalist material agent in city-making. I favour an understanding of stony matter as a social collective or social grouping, so framing city-making as a collective act of ongoing making between human and non-human actors. The idea of matter as a 'social agent' suggests that stone is capable of acting independently of humans. Stones may form alliances with other non-human entities or collectivities without human consent or intervention. Within this research, I pose the following questions: How can Johannesburg's urban terrains be considered post-extractive urban terrains? What are the vital agencies of stone in post-extractive urban terrains? How can creative practitioners learn about them through bodily entangled creative practice? How can stone agencies be used as a creative practice methodology to become co-labourers with the living matter as a tool for troubling anthropocentrism in extractive terrains? I explore these questions through an embodied creative practice approach to research, examining these questions within philosophy, literature and artistic practice. I use these questions to develop tools for thinking and practising with the stony matter as ways of relating that enable us to live well with other than human oddkin within post- extractive urban terrains. Furthermore, I explore possibilities for re-imagining posthuman ways of thinking about cities. The ultimate aim of the work is illustrated in the diagram below. In this research, I aim to thicken the conversation around the post-extractive terrain by thinking, acting and practising in stony ways. The work aims to aggregate multiple approaches to thinking through and with the stony matter found within the central Witwatersrand ridgeline, naturally occurring and human-made alike, along the path to understanding post-extractive urban terrains as vibrant and feral sites of becoming. As such, the work situates itself between histories and theories of architecture, urban and material practice, balanced against a creative practice project, which can be considered iterative.Item Articulating Embedded Choreographies: Implicit Knowledges As/And Choreographic Strategies(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-08) Snyman, Johannes Hendrik Bailey; Ravengai, SamuelThis thesis ‘looks back’ to ‘look forward’. I start with the assertion that there is a deficiency of choreographers documenting their processes that emerge in the laboratory. Using mixed methods this thesis focuses on embodied autoethnography to find a means to document and articulate my research and creative process. The first part of this research contextualises choreographic research in South Africa, choreography and embodiment and finally a conceptualisation of my understanding of choreographic strategies. The second part focuses on the embodiment philosophy of Michael Polanyi and articulates a third dimension of knowledge that exists in the gap between tacit and explicit knowledge: embedded-implicit knowledge. A clear correlation is established between embedded-implicit knowledge or ‘knowing’ and intuition. I then crafted Harald Grimen’s (1991) four interpretations of Michael Polanyi’s (1958) ‘tacit knowledge’ into choreographic strategies and used each as an approach in the development of specific creative tasks for the creation of an original choreography: L.I.F.E a history of distance (2017). My inspirations and musings became an invaluable part of this research through articulating my own interpretations of Grimen and my personal history as a source in developing a narrative structure for the work. Finally using a multi-modal reflection framework, developed from various reflexive practices, I reflected on the research and processes to answer the research question: How can Harald Grimen’s four interpretations of Michael Polanyi’s philosophy of tacit knowledge be interpreted as choreographic strategies to articulate the embedded-implicit knowledge within the process of documenting an embedded choreographic practice?Item Paradise on Earth as a Motto, the Price of Happiness. What Happens to the Body in Late Capitalism(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-01) Salmon, Audrey; Gillepsie, Kelly; Andrew, David; Sakota-Kokot, TanjaIsn’t it now guaranteed that ‘paradise’ can be accessible during our lifetime? Haven’t you read, heard, or seen this somewhere yet? I have. Consequently, without thinking, I fully embraced this promise. Paradise is here and there, paradise is this and that, paradise is everything, everywhere. Nonetheless it happens to be a sort of cornucopia eventually resulting in no choice. It is a repetitive and merciless empty promise. Paradise on Earth is a brutal and transformative repetition colonising bodies. Forty thousand and one times the word paradise is written down. Forty thousand and one times is the core of the thesis. It is the thesis, and it forms and materialises brutality. It forms and materialises transformation. It attempts to figure and identify the specific effect of this specific condition on the body while paradoxically trying to give a voice to this same fainting body. Paradise, can you hear, see, touch it or even dream about it? The first image that comes to my mind is comforting. A smile even lifts the corners of my mouth, the object of my desire being almost here. Sadly, paradise on Earth’s ubiquity only reminds us of our failures. Up to today it is still haunting. All the way along, repetition happens to be an organ of torture as much as salvation. This research intends to take us through the work of diagnosis, and the embodied entanglement in these conditions under late capitalism.Item Paper Choreography: My ancestors dance through me - Experimenting with the Unarchival of a South African South Asian Dancer’s Family Archive while Exploring 'Indian-ness’ and Interwoven Dance Cultures and its pedagogical contribution to or implications for the reconfiguring of the Archive(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-06) Govender-Elshove, Anusia; Khan, Sharlene; Taub, MyerThe aim of this study was to challenge the understanding of the concept of an archive of the indigenous/marginalised in territory that was previously dominated by a western/colonial presence, in places and spaces that are considered non-traditional. To explore the archive as a performative process and expansive practice by answering the question: How can the ‘unarchival’ process be a functional framework with which to make meaning in transmuting or liberating the artefacts of my family archive, my embodied self, and the ‘Indian-ness’ of South Asian dance, through reconfiguration of experimental iterations that reflect the current reality of this dance form as it unfolds and develops in the South African dance industry and academy? The idea was to utilise the artefacts of my family dance archive, in creative ways, to highlight the interweaving of cultures, while also disrupting the notion of purity and authenticity around South Asian dance with a melange interweaving of the archive of dance styles present in my body of work. The research methodology utilised was autoethnography/biography, with yarning/storytelling to acknowledge the geneaology/genesis of the perceived Indian monolithic culture in both India and South Africa. This study focused on the process of the ‘unarchival’ of my physical family dance archive and, my South Asian dancing body which is a palimpsestic, embodied, living archive. This involved curating an online exhibition of groupings of artefacts, of re-presenting and re-storying, deconstructing and reconstructing my family archive, thereby making them both emancipated and accessible. I argued that the archive is not limited to ‘Indian-ness’, but consists of an early interweaving and intermingling of cultures. The physical artefacts were used to create various iterations of “paper choreography” as my creative work activates the family archive, using paper to enable movement/dance. There was experimentation with age-old modes and my curatorial role in preserving and perpetuating my family’s dance origins which intersects with South Asian dance history in South Africa more broadly, and particularly its pedagogy. By researching unarchival as a curatorial process, I have attempted to recreate history and socio-political narratives: on a macro-level (the histories of both the Indian subcontinent - its influences and changes over centuries – as well as African history) and a micro-level (my own history) with a primordial conceptualisation. Three chapters focus firstly on the Unarchival process and its formulation. Next, the exploration of the concept of ‘Indian-ness’ in terms of dance, identity and archival implications for this study. The final chapter explores the interwoven nature of the dance direction my family and I chose to take by incorporating many cultures into our Indian dance core curriculum over 61 years. This creative study addressed the dearth in the field in the South African academy. The relevance/importance of the study to the field is that the unarchival process/act is seen as a relatively unexplored area, not just in reconfiguring an archive, but also the embodiment of the culture and identity of South Asian dance and dancers that are often mis/under-represented and misunderstood.