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surface tension

Fri Jun 2, 19:30 - Sat Jun 3, 20:45

UCT Hiddingh Hall

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The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) invites you to

surface tension


a showing of a new work by Jay Pather in collaboration with Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre


Friday 2 and Saturday 3 June

Hiddingh Hall

UCT Hiddingh Campus.

19h30 for 20h00*

We'll start just after 20h00 to avoid loadshedding interruption.


move, block, avoid, wait

turn, move, block pause turn around move block wait

annihilate, wait…

 

This text forms one of the projections that floats over six performers making sense of an onslaught of surfaces that assail the body in its daily waking moments. The work surface tension, conceived and directed by Jay Pather in collaboration with the Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, is an interdisciplinary choreography that considers surface – layers of topographic maps, skin, metal, cloth - as prompt to re-find the body amidst the tensions that are wrought on its frame.

 

In spaces of transformation, or its lack of transformation, the tension between remaining still and moving in response to the assault of unyielding surface also emerges as a question for the company. Constantly moving and refusing stillness ironically emerges as a strategy for survival amidst surfaces that do not allow for time to be still - a state of constant tremblement, what Edouard Glissant calls neither incertitude nor fear. It is not what paralyzes us. Trembling thinking is the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought.

In surface tension kinetic, visual and textual layers emerge from testimonies by South Africans around maintaining order in fields of chaos. Movement and spatial tension together with surfaces and palimpsests are all wrought through dance, video projections, a plethora of objects, and voice to nudge the public and intimate ways in which the body aches to speak and be re-felt. The performers invoke ultimately, the corporeal desire to surface, defying and confronting the absurdities, blind spots, savagery and brutality of contemporary politics.


Jay Pather is a choreographer, a curator and performance theorist. His artistic work deploys site-specific, interdisciplinary, and intercultural strategies to frame postcolonial imaginaries, decolonization and matters of social justice. Recent works include Qaphela Caesar, a deconstruction of Julius Caesar, at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and as director for two of Nadia Davids’ plays (What Remains, winning a Fleur du Cap for direction) and Hold Still for which he was nominated for a Fleur Du Cap). Pather directs the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town. He curates Infecting the CityICA Live Art Festival and Afrovibes (in the Netherlands) and co-curates the Spier Light Art Festival. Recent publications include a book he co-edited, Transgressions, Live Art in South Africa. In 2021, Ketu Katrak published a monograph of Pather’s work titled Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa.


Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre is a South African dance company based in Durban that emerged in 1996 from a training and development programme for Black dancers with no access to training opportunities. The Company has since travelled widely and is noted for their multi-media collaborations, using video, architecture, and site-specificity in their performances. surface tension features four generations of Siwela Sonke Dancers: Neliswa Rushualang (founding member since 1996), Sibusiso Gantsa (since 2006) Noxolo Rushulang and Mandisa Ndlovu (since 2015) and current trainees Lucky Shelembe and Sandile Mbhamali.


This performance is made possible through the Villa Albertine Residency.


Entrance is free.

DIRECTIONS

surface tension
UCT Hiddingh Hall
31 Orange St, Cape Town City Centre, Cape Town, 8000
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