Browsing by Author "Matchett, Sara"

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    A new body of order: designing social meaning through performance
    (2023) Jenkin, Juliet; Matchett, Sara; Fleishman Mark
    This study identifies an absence of order in contemporary social life and offers a design-based response to that absence, theorising order as a living phenomenon of regulation, meaning and authority that may be generated through the participatory, symbolic, embodied, creative and relational practice of performance. This participatory interpretation of order motivates the study's methodology which proposes performance as a mode and method of design and suggests that order may be designed through performance. An initial case study (reflecting on the process of a theatre production) presents a design methodology based on the identifying elements of performance, namely: embodiment, mimesis, ephemerality and agon. The practice of designing order is tested through two participatory design projects that identify an absence of order and address that absence using an exploratory process of performance-as-design. The first project investigates an order of authority in a classroom context, and the second an order of consent in response to participant concerns around physical intimacy. Both projects build embodied, relational structures that enact regulation, meaning and authority and demonstrate that designing order through performance is possible, productive, and effective.
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    Breath-Body-Self : an exploration of the body as a site for generating images for performance making
    (2016) Matchett, Sara; Fleishman, Mark
    This thesis investigates the body as a site for generating images for purposes of performance making. It is a methodological study that draws from various traditions, methods and somatic practices, such as yoga, Fitzmaurice Voicework®, the Sanskrit system of rasa, body mapping and free writing. The study specifically focuses on interrogating the relationship between breath and emotion, and breath and image, in an attempt to make performance that is inspired by a biography of the body. It explores the relationship between body, breath and feeling and how this impacts on the imagination in processes of generating images for performance making. It further investigates whether breath can be experienced as an embodied element that is sensed somatically by performers, and in so doing act as a catalyst for activating memories, stories, and experiences held in the body of the performer. The potential of breath as impulse as well as thread that connects imagination, memory, body, and expression, is investigated. Using the conceptual framework of somaesthetics, the study draws from theories of the body, neuroscience and cognitive philosophy to support its claims. Through the disciplinary framework of somaesthetics, as an embodied philosophical practice, it is suggested that the performer cultivates a heightened awareness that makes possible what is being proposed as a process of performance making. It draws on my experience as a lecturer of theatre in the Department of Drama at the University of Cape Town as well as on my experience as a maker of performance with The Mothertongue Project, a women's arts collective I co-founded in South Africa in 2000. My work with The Mothertongue Project, emanates from a particular ideological position in the world that is informed by the context in which I locate. South Africa has some of the highest rates of rape and sexualised violence against women in the world. The result is a society where women's bodies, in particular, are constantly under threat of being violated. In summary, this thesis explores the relationship between a particular kind of performance making process for a particular kind of work within a particular kind of context. It seeks to provide women with the tools and space to speak back to the social context they inhabit. The choice to include a creative project as a case study alludes to the synergetic relationship between theory and practice. One that is cyclical; one that speaks directly to the method of image generation for purposes of performance making that is being proposed, where the route between breath, body, emotion and image, maps a circular trajectory.
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    Breathing space : cross-community professional theatre as a means of dissolving fixed geographical landscapes
    (2005) Matchett, Sara; Banning, Yvonne
    In this paper, I investigate the idea of cross-community professional theatre as a means of dissolving fixed georgraphical landscapes. Key to this is the synergy between mainstream and community theatre, out of which this idea emerges. I explore how theatre facilitates conversations across differences. 'Differences' encompass questions of geographical, class and racial divides as well as the ideological differences between mainstream and community theatre. Cross-community professional theatre involves working with people from different communities around specific issues. Professional actors work alongside non-professional actors from communities to create a piece of theatre. Community members are involved in the process as well as in the performance. Cross-community refers not only to the exchange between professional actors and non-professional actors, but also to the idea of theatre providing a framework for conversations between different communities.
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    Collaborative conversations: The Mothertongue Project in profile
    (2005) Matchett, Sara
    In June 1999, over a cup of chai in a monsoon-filled Mumbai kitchen, writer, performer and director Rehane Abrahams asked me whether I would consider directing her in a piece that she was writing. According to Rehane, the piece was a seminal work that would mark a transition into a new way of being for her. On our return to Cape Town the following year, we began working on the production. While filling out funding application forms, we were suddenly confronted with the question of what to call ourselves. The production had to be attached to an organisation. Initially, we wanted to call the production Mothertongue, as Rehane felt that if she had had access to her mother's tongue in the form of stories when she was younger, her life might have panned out differently. In coming up with a name for our organisation, we decided that the name Mothertongue was better suited to an organisation and that What the Water Gave Me would work as a title for the production, because of its elemental nature.
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    Handsome Devil: an exploration of contemporary South African girlhood/s through playwriting
    (2014) Gardini, Genna; Matchett, Sara
    The play is set in an all-girls academy in contemporary South Africa.
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    How the lived experiences of black women can be understood through devised theatre informed by psychophysical actor training: an adaptation of the Tadashi Suzuki actor training technique
    (2018) Makgabutlane,Linda; Matchett, Sara
    In this study I aim to use my body as a tool to derive themes for use in performance making and to underpin this in theory. I focus on aspects of Tadashi Suzuki (1986) actor training (referred to as Suzuki training), free writing and the body. I use black feminism, cognitive neuroscience and body theory to account for my lived body, which I then use in performance. Practice and theory informed each other in a cyclical manner in accordance with Practice as Research as a methodology. Therefore, elements that emerged from my practice determined the theory included in the study, as practice was considered a way of knowing. I work to establish a relationship between race, subjugation and some of the multiple implications thereof on the body in the urban context: I draw on limited notions of culture and the body to interrogate how these can materialise in performance. The study also addresses aspects of the performing body to support why I derive value in Suzuki (1986) training as one psychophysical actor training tool. I theoretically discuss this technique as developing expressive abilities in young performers. The primary purpose of this research is to create work that is rooted in the tradition of devising. My research moves between the physical body and the body in performance in a South African context as I worked to conceptually account for the body in both instances. Although limited, this research includes theories that account for the performing body engaged in somatic foot-based practices where these interact with my practice. I further discuss the devising process I undertook with a cast, as a performance maker, my findings and reflection on this process.
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    Porosity at play: investigating the role of facilitator in the training and performance of masked theatre
    (2011) Hershler, Laen; Matchett, Sara
    The study utilizes the practitioner/researcher’s own artistic process as a laboratory, if you will, to conduct a broader inquiry into how theatre masks work and a facilitator’s role within the process of "bringing them to life."
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    Self/scape: an exploration of belonging and wayfaring
    (2019) Paredes, Miguel Angel; Matchett, Sara
    Self/Scape is an autoethnographic sonic exploration of searching, belonging, and praying through sound as well as exploring the socio-cultural conditions and the lived experiences of a globalized Latino. Following the framework of Practice as Research (PaR), Miguel has been creating and theorizing about and through this piece during his two-year degree. This piece is the culmination of Miguel’s research at UCT in which a theatrical production is transformed into a curated space that is made to coexist with(in) a digital soundscape. That is to say that this piece has been created to be experienced through the use of headphones and QR codes. Each QR code will be specifically placed in relation to the content of the code which documents the journey of self-discovery through a multitude of spaces around the world from Los Angeles to Cape Town.
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    Sexuality and cultural heritage at odds: I Fuck What I Like, an ode to the young queer black woman in South Africa
    (2021) Sibisi, Noluthando Mpho; Seane, Warona; Matchett, Sara
    I write this paper as a theatre practitioner to complete a creative research project in line with complicating and archiving queer black women's narratives in the South African performance and literary canon. As a strategy of social reform, I aim to complicate what I argue to be an insistent narrative of queer black womanhood as emblematic of abjection by exploring the concept of queer black woman joy. I use Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness, alongside Lethabo Mailula's theory of a tripartite erasure of queer black women, to frame what I consider to be queer black women's cultural heritage. In search of research methods, I turn to the work of Koleka Putuma, Zanele Muholi, Athi-Patra Ruga as my artistic influences, from whom I garner multivocality, collage, ode, and play as methods for my autoethnographic explorations concerning writing, performing, and archiving joy as part of the queer black woman narrative. This research project culminates in the writing, performance, and archiving of I Fuck What I Like as an ode to the young queer black woman in South Africa.