OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Pather, Jay"

Browsing by Author "Pather, Jay"

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Open Access
Creating personas, performing selves – gazing beyond the masks of drag and neo-burlesque performance
(2021) Prince, Lindy-Lee; Levine, Susan; Matebeni, Zethu; Pather, Jay
What if gender is not in the body, but happens to it through a combination of tangible and intangible means – through the coverings that mask, as well as the translations of and on the body? What if gender was malleable? If we cannot break gender, smash it to pieces, then, hopefully we might be able to bend it and fashion it into something that is more useful in the world, desirable, and something functional for an immediate need, or purpose. This thesis introduces the reader to the performance of drag and neo-burlesque, as these take place in bars and nightclubs in Cape Town. I use the concepts of the gaze and the mask in this research to unpack and understand the feminine and hyper-feminine performances by drag and neo-burlesque performers. I argue that contemporary understandings of the “male” gaze, as posited by Laura Mulvey, have become inefficient in addressing the complexities of viewing gendered performances and audience interpretation thereof. I ask the reader to consider how audiences are set up to look at a performance and performing body and what they are meant to interpret about the person, or their character, by looking at the performance. I want to look beyond the stereotypical “male” gaze. I attempt to add to the conversation on objectification in performance, by arguing that the performances that take place on drag and neo-burlesque stages, possess the ability to challenge dominant ideals and social regulations regarding the ways in which gendered bodies ought to perform in public and private space through the prescriptions of a hetero-dominant society. In this thesis I discuss gendered performance, and expression, and the ways in which these performances and expressions work alongside prescribed perceptions of femininity and feminine performance. These prescriptions inform the ways in which individuals are allowed to perform a homogenous idea of gender, and work against gender variance, which in turn, informs the manner in which individuals are allowed to perform sexuality in relation to what is socially mandated and allowed in the heterodominant society. In this thesis, I also explore the creation of the staged performance, and discuss themes of stigma and shame as it is used to discipline those who attempt to perform potentially subversive content in publicly accessible spaces. Further, I explore understandings of beauty and performance, making 7 connections to race, class, and aspirational performance by those who perform drag and neoburlesque in Cape Town. This leads to an exploration of the potential ways in which life outside of the performance might inform the life on stage, and vice versa – asking what is feminine performance, in what ways are feminine performances meant to be viewed, as well as questioning what kinds of feminine performances are socially acceptable?
Open Access
Dramatization and philosophy of history in Orange Book explication of a site-responsive work and its research
(2012) Unwin, Charles; Pather, Jay
The explication presents Orange Book as a piece of site-responsive public space performance, showing how similar patterns of thought and feeling emerging in both research and artwork led to elaborating the notion of an art methodology for the work. The explication further considers a process of research into drama and history in relation to contemporary performance: where narrative dramatic forms,whether organic or fragmented, show history as a fait accompli, an aesthetic orientation around open structures and non-narrative performance modes allows for a constructive, ethically directed, philosophical engagement with historical process. The explication thus demonstrates implications of biography, philosophy, history and dramatization in my search for a distinctive performance idiom.
Open Access
Exploring the field of autotopography through live art practice : The frieze, The anatomy lecture theatre and The security hut
(2014) Postlethwaite, Rosa; Pather, Jay
This paper presents: The Frieze, The Anatomy Lecture Theatre and The Security Hut as outcomes of my practice-based research project into strategies of making autotopographical performance. Departing from Gonzalez’s theory of autotopography (1995), which focuses on objects belonging to individuals that are seen to signify their identity, and drawing on Heddon’s (2002; 2008), Bal’s (2002) and Arlander’s (2012) subsequent discussions around the term, I unpack the process of making live art performances in response to a site. During the process of making I examined the relationships between the material landscape, my processes of memory and my sense-of-self.
Open Access
Exploring the tension between Coleridge's Poetic Faith and disbelief in the metatheatrical strategies used in a Mask, a Key and a Pair of Broken Wings
(2007) Keevy, Jon; Pather, Jay
This explication is focused on the metatheatrical strategies employed in my thesis production: a Mask, a Key and a Pair of Broken Wings, a triptych of three short plays. The paper pursues a deeper understanding of the nature of an audience's engagement with onstage narratives. The production explores existential dilemmas through stories about runaways and escapees. Jean Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (first published 1943) can be construed as a map of the territories that the stories explore. I also employ a Sartrean style of argument in the unpacking ofthe strategies applied in the production's staging. A cornerstone of both the narrative and academic inquiry is Sartre's notion of 'bad faith' and the construction of self through it. In order to fully explore the constructedness of self, the production is done in a metatheatrical form. Metatheatre was coined by Lionel Abel to describe plays that consciously drew attention to their own construction. It is an appropriate form to expose the layers of relationships between the real and the performed. In order to better understand the nature of audience engagement the paper considers two relatively unused sources of dramatic theory, Coleridge and Tolkien. Coleridge's writings in Bibliographia Literaria (first published 1817) on disbelief and poetic faith are used to discuss the receptivity of an audience, while Tolkien's concept of the division between the primary and secondary worlds allows the discussion of what the audience perceives. The key distinction between disbelief and poetic faith is the distinction between intellectual objection and emotional ascent to a secondary world. By discussing the tactics of Metatheatre to be used in a Mask. a Key and a Pair of Broken Wings, the benefits and pitfalls of each strategy is revealed. My argument describes the possible effects of these on an audience's consciousness as the results of variations in the relative strengths of their intellectual and emotional perceptions. Metatheatre is a rupture of the secondary world, the object of the audience's poetic faith. Metatheatre can be a powerful tool in the theatremaker's arsenal only by understanding how poetic faith and disbelief function in tension and in harmony with one another.
Open Access
Homecoming: finding a place for shamanic practice in the creation of post colonial theatre
(2010) Kiel, Sue; Pather, Jay
At the centre of my research, in the light of my homecoming and notions of home, there is a question: might I find a place where dimensions of shamanism might intersect with modes of performance, in the creation of theatre for the 21st Century? In this liminal hybrid moment, a place between the present and the future, I suggest that art is actually necessary and that it is essential for artists to build a counter-narrative, both locally and globally, to terror, suffering and denial. Art and social change can be a trend for certain nations, societies, even artists and theorists. In my view, however, which is my point of departure, it is particularly in an era of self reference, modernity, post modern and post colonial rupture and fragmentation that an informed coherence between the inexplicable terror of unsettling major social upheaval and the individual, may be able to be sketched once again and with certainty, by and through art and performance; if not actual transformation; then a witnessing, an acknowledgement and an end to the pain of denial. This explication begins with an overview of current socio-political dilemmas, and looks at the role of theatre in impacting change. My exploration continues with an examination of the role of shamanism as a tool to assist the theatre maker, the actor and even the audience in the pursuit of a transforming experience where one might initiate a shift in perceptions, thought and consciousness. In my observation of current theatre makers in South Africa, I am finding that this is already taking place. The object of this paper is to frame and make more specific, the role of shamanism as it connects to interdisciplinary techniques and technologies for performance. In my practical research, which will include my culminating production, Passages (provisional title), I attempt to tease out these methodologies in order to expand my work and be a part of the development of theory and practice in theatre making in these significant and urgent times, for my 21st Century homes. The primary theorists that I have referenced, contained in my theoretical framework, are Ashraf Jamal, Sarah Nuttall, Achille Mbembe, Homi Bhabha, Breyten Breytenbach, Iain Chambers and Hamid Naficy. In my research for my praxis, I have worked predominantly with the findings of Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Antonin Artaud, Peter Sellars, Jerzy Grotowski, Alison Oddey and Rachel Karafistan.
Open Access
Layering time : the representation of tradition in contemporary multimedia performance
(2008) Molema, Moratiwa; Pather, Jay
As a culminating thesis project my Master of Fine Arts degree in Film and Television, chose to create a theatrical production that incorporated multiple video projections as well as performance forms such as dance, drama, music and ritual. This explication then begins answering the question, 'how does a student of film and television production engage with live performance and create a theatrical event as opposed to a DVD as a final outcome?' The 'why' lies in the hypothesis contained in the title of the explication "Layering Time: The Representation of Tradition in Contemporary Multi Media Performance." I was exposed to multimedia techniques at the University of Hartford in America while pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Through the Master of Fine Arts in Film and Television programme at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, J wished to expand and deepen what I had learnt as an undergraduate student. The result of this effort was my thesis production. The theme of the production and the concept of layering time dealt with the importance of continuity and representations of traditional culture in a contemporary world, which is a layering of past and present. As a multi-media production,WaterFeels, was also an exploration of conceptual relationships between different art forms and the potential in this use of mixed media for notions of past and present time to exist simultaneously.
Open Access
Making “Quare” Spaces: Re-membering Childhood as a Queer Practice of Indigenous African Place-making
(2022) Mbatsha, Tandile; Mtshali, Mbongeni; Pather, Jay
Queers of colour are in real and constant danger as they are not seen to belong neatly to either Western queer culture (due to their blackness) or African culture (due to their queerness). This discursive violence legitimizes actual violence on black queer bodies. This research project uses performance as a tool to address black queer erasure and aims to debunk the tired claim that queerness is un-African. In my final thesis production and its accompanying explication, I engage with memory and practices of queer self-fashioning as a means of contesting oppressive, hegemonic, and heteronormative ideologies of gendered racial belonging. Memory thus serves as both a critical concept and an aesthetic impulse in my practice of queer space making. I use performances of intimate childhood memories of shame and othering to articulate how black queer subjects emerge in distinct relation and/or contra-position to the white Euro-American identity construct that dominates understanding of queer citizenship and politics. In so doing, I work towards naming and enacting a “quare” (Johnson, 2001, p. 8) politics that attends to the specificity of black queer lifeworlds. Producing a counterhegemonic queer space that is attentive to the potentially generative tensions between “queerness” and black African indigenous ontologies enables the envisioning and affirming of black African queer subjectivity in all its complexity. I use Johnson's critical reframing of ‘queer' as ‘quare' as the basis for my engagement with queerof-colour critiques of hetero- and homonormativity. Quare in this research study is deployed as part of various contemporary endeavours to locate racialised and class knowledge in identity. It is also used to articulate genderqueer and sexually non-conforming subjectivities such that ways of knowing are viewed both as “discursively mediated and as historically situated and materially conditioned” (Johnson, 2001, p. 13). The practice of self-reflexivity through performance is posited as a method for self-image fashioning in this study. Further, I show in my performance work that Johnson's (2001) construal of self-image-making and performativity have potential for restoring subjectivity and agency through the performance of self.
Open Access
Moving ideas about moving bodies : teaching physical theatre as a response to violence and the violated body
(2012) Reznek, Jennie; Pather, Jay
In this thesis I explore my obsession with teaching the physical theatre body over the past twenty-five years.Two sets of questions are proposed: How does the teaching of physical theatre respond to violence and the violated body; and how does pedagogy change when it moves from one context to another? Firstly, I argue that the pedagogy developed by Jacques Lecoq in Paris responded like a pendulum to the extreme violence perpetrated on bodies during the Second World War. I argue that my own practice, influenced by my two years of study at École Jacques Lecoq (1984-1986), continued this tradition by responding to what, I propose, existed as a ‘culture of violence’ in South Africa from the period of colonialism through the apartheid era and into the present. I analyse the impact of violence on the body by focusing on three consequences - stillness, erasure and rupture - and come to an understanding of how the teaching of physical theatre, as per Lecoq and myself, counters all three with a focus on the moving, articulate, individuated body capable of transformation. Secondly, I propose that pedagogy responds to geographic, philosophical and historical contexts and is subject to modification when context changes. The methodology has included conventional research, a comparative analysis of the two contexts, and an analysis of my own experiences - from notebooks that I have kept - as a student and teacher.
Open Access
Performing the (un)inherited language, identity, performance
(2012) Seabe, Lesoko Vuyokazi; Pather, Jay
I will examine how language usage in Post-Apartheid South Africa is central to identity construction and discern in what ways this construction informs my approach to creating performance. I use this paper to offer a frame as to how a relationship to language is socially and historically constructed in post-apartheid South Africa, how this construction affects questions of cultural and linguistic identity, and finally how those identities are performed. This is achieved by exploring how vocal work, text, language and the physical body are integrated to use as material in creating my individual performed vernacular modalities. My research has employed various methodologies to navigate and engage issues of language and identity towards creating a performance. First by using Neville Alexander's research into the history of language and language policy in South Africa, I briefly outline the manner in which languages in South Africa gain dominance and in tum how this affects individual attitudes towards English, Afrikaans and other official vernaculars. As my practice as a performer-creator has been central to the research use the paper to unpack the relationship between notions of language, identity and performance and reflect on my bilingual isiXhosa/English training at The university of Cape Town. I interrogate the manner in which this training is central in shaping my understanding of how the inheritance of, and affiliation with languages, informs identity. I make reference to my own linguistic repertoire as explored through three projects produced within the period of the Masters research conducted at the University of Cape Town (VCT): The Minor Project As Yet Withheld (2011); The Medium Project Four (2011), my one person show created over the December-January period and performed in March 2012. The thesis production There was this sound which at the time of writing is still in production. In my reading of linguistic theories, the use of the terms 'mother tongue', 'home language' and 'first language' are used almost interchangeably to describe the language first learned and used in the home as the primary language . In this research, however, the 'mother tongue', 'home language' and 'first language' are recognised as three different linguistic proficiencies in accordance with linguist Sinfree Makoni' s(1998) understanding of how one engages with language on three levels: inheritance, affiliation and expertise. Thesen's (1997) use of Bakhtin (1988) in relation to identity, is significantly useful in this investigation as it appears to be the most flexible use of Identity Theory taking into consideration, as it does, "life histories and biographies" (Norton, 1997:417) and "seeks to give greater prominence to human agency in theorizing notions of voice" (Norton, 1997: 417). Norton identifies this theory as speaking consciousness - "the individual speaking or writing at the point of utterance, always laden with language of others, from previous contexts and oriented towards some future response" (Norton, 1997:417). Through interviews conducted with black female creator-performers I use their biographies as a means to engage notions of identity and language. Finally, I explore processes of creating the final thesis production There was this sound informed theoretically by the work presented in this paper and produced for the stage by utilizing the actors four major tools "emotion, intellect, body and voice" (Mills, 2009:9) to engage all the languages I have at my disposal as well as learned performance tools, towards creating a new vernacular of performance.
Open Access
Plot 99 : towards a feminine semiotic : spiritual and sexual emergence(y) in women's puppetry and visual performance
(2012) Marneweck, Aja; Pather, Jay; Bennett, Jane
This thesis explores how a multidisciplinary Feminine Semiotics may find expression through the cross-disciplinary medium of puppetry and visual performance. It investigates puppetry's relevance to the developing academic field of Practice as Research in performance. It considers the theoretical and creative applications of this multidisciplinary art form in the innovative Feminine Semiotics of emergence(y) in the production Plot 99.
Open Access
Probing the politics of the female body: Robyn Orlin's deconstruction of the Classical Ballet canon
(2014) Katzke, Cecilia Johanna; Pather, Jay; Samuel, Gerard
This qualititative, interdisciplinary study predominantly focuses on the South African choreographer Robyn Orlin and her deconstructions of classical ballet. To inform a gender-centred investigation of Orlin’s work, attention is given to the origins of patriarchal dualisms and the way in which these manifest in contemporary Western culture. Emphasis is placed on the institutional repression of the body as a way to preserve particular power structures. In this instance the theories of Michel Foucault, in particular, are referenced. His concepts serve to illuminate a consideration of Western concert dance, with a particular focus on classical ballet, as an institution that sustains gender as a system of power. The origins of the aesthetic of the ballerina as an icon of femininity, and the way in which certain values and expectations impact on the bodies of female ballet dancers, particularly but not exclusively, provides a context for the discussion of Orlin’s work – how and why her form and content questions and undermines the perpetuation of traditional gender stereotypes in classical ballet. This dissertation examines Orlin’s work in order to expand discourse around the subversive potential of the female body, informed by an understanding of the body as an ever-changing entity that resists definition by way of essentialist meanings.
Open Access
Theatre of the contact zone : a quest for a means to nurse split psychic spaces in public spheres through the transformation of dramatic texts into performance texts
(2007) Chimoga, Tichaona Ronald Kizito; Banning, Yvonne; Singer, Jacque; Pather, Jay
This study is a theoretical explication of an idea of a theatre called Theatre of the Contact Zone. Its main feature is the collaboration between the playwright and the director in the transformation of dramatic texts into performance texts. Within the pragmatics of this theatre the playwright's initial task is to provide a working script. It is only a foundation, the basis, without which the director has nothing to begin coordinating the collaborative process of theatre making. The writing of the script continues through out rehearsals. The final script is compiled after the production incorporating changes made in the course of its transformation into a performance, as well as insights gained through watching the production. The first experiment was through a play called An African Syzygy which I wrote and was directed by Sanjin Muftic (a fellow postgraduate student whose orientation in theatre studies is directing).
Open Access
Towards performing an afropolitan subjectivity
(2008) Kabwe, Mwenya; Banning, Yvonne; Pather, Jay
Emerging directly from three devised performances conducted as practical research projects in the exploration of my thesis, the production supported by this explication titled Afrocartography: Traces of Places and all points in between, (Afrocartography) is located within a series of works that explore an Afropolitan subject position. Towards the goal of articulating a theatrical form, style and aesthetic of this so called Afropolitan experience, the first section of this paper serves to locate the term Afropolitan within a personal contextual frame from which the paper progresses.
Open Access
Visualising Human Migrations in Cape Town The story of three ships through ‘time’, ‘space’ and ‘memory’
(2019) Singh, Meghna; Pather, Jay; Shepherd, Nick
This practice-led PhD contributes to an understanding of contemporary art practice as a tool to render visible and unravel capitalist imaginaries within the field of migration studies. Focusing on the theme of contemporary and historical migrations at Cape Town through research conducted on three ships between 2013 and 2017, it uses the themes of ‘time’, ‘space’ and ‘memory’ to visualise migrations. The PhD interrogates the hidden process of globalisation; the invisibility of the workings of the port; the invisibility of the workers; their stories and their connection to the movement of capital, and renders them visible through the research. The study is situated at the intersection of migration studies, visual art practices and artistic research methods. Using the methodology of observational filmmaking and the creation of immersive multimedia installations incorporating virtual reality, it borrows from the work of anthropologists like David MacDougall (1998); Michael Taussig (1993); James Clifford (1988); Alyssa Grossman (2013); and Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (2005) who make a case for the technique of ‘visualising anthropology’ in the field of ethnographic enquiry. Furthering the case of observational filming as a sensory form of investigation, I draw on the work of film scholar Laura Marks who advocates the phenomenon of “tactile epistemologies” (2000) and Doug Aitkens whose creations of split narrative videos illustrate the immersive experience I seek to achieve in my creative outputs. The central argument of this study is that an experience of research, conducted through the medium of observational filmmaking and presented via immersive video installations, creates visibility, empathy and an understanding of situations through corporeal embodiment, adding to the field of visual art and migration research.
Open Access
Working theory : an analysis of the use and misuse performance tools
(2016) Kawitzky, Roxy; Pather, Jay
In this paper, I work through some of the theoretical and practical research concerns which have emerged during my MA in Theatre Making, including the Minor, Medium and Major projects developed as part of its coursework component. I begin with an outline of my core hermeneutic lenses, describing the relationship between the expressive faculties of the brain, voice and body in performance articulation, advocating for their de-conventionalisation within theatrical modes, and indicating a more diverse range of possibilities for these performance tools. I then describe the three primary examples I will be using in my explication, and relate each to a specific chapter; Siri Hustvedt's novel The Blazing World is discussed in the chapter of the Brain, and used to speak about the relationship between an expressed, materialised art object, and its invisible progenitor or counterpart which exists privately in the mind of the artist. Boris Nikitin's Woyzeck is discussed in terms of its approach to representation and communication, and the peculiar relationship it establishes between audience and performer. Finally, I talk about my Medium Project Journey from the Centre of the Earth in a consideration of the bodily and ethical implications of participatory performance practice, before beginning to describe my final production, CLOAKS, and concluding.

Browsing by Author "Pather, Jay"

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