Browsing by Author "Pather, Jayendran"

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    Anarchival dance: choreographic archives and the disruption of knowledge
    (2020) Parker, Alan; Fleishman, Mark; Pather, Jayendran
    This thesis details a practice-led investigation of the archive, explored through choreography and the creation of three anarchival performances. The research theorises the anarchival as a creative research methodology for archival questioning and epistemological disruption, enacted through the body. Through a critically reflexive thinking-through of choreographic practice, alongside an interpretivist analysis of performance works by six contemporary South African artists, the thesis surfaces specific ways in which an anarchival disruption of the archive facilitates a re-thinking of colonially inherited knowledge systems, implicit in the archive. The research thus frames anarchival disruption within the broader decolonial project in South Africa as a necessary and valuable strategy for developing a decolonial archival praxis. Chapter One positions the archive in relation to poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques and establishes the archive as a system of knowledge production deeply implicated in the proliferation of colonial epistemologies and the subjugation of bodies and embodied ways of knowing. Chapter Two conceptualises the anarchive, through process philosophy and Deleuzian ontologies, as an alternative archive comprised of the virtual traces of the past that the traditional archive excludes. These traces constitute points of contact for creative research and, when engaged with through the body, become sites for recreation and reimagining. Chapters Three, Four and Five each explicate specific approaches to this encounter in creative practice, departing from three forms of archival remains: objects, bodies, and ghosts, respectively. The disruptive effects of these practices are then developed further through the analysis of specific performance works where related anarchival disruption is evident. Chapter Three considers affect as a disruptor of hierarchical divisions between subject and object in Steven Cohen's Put your heart under your feet… and walk!/To Elu (2017) and Dineo Seshee Bopape's Sa koša ke lerole (2017). Chapter Four analyses the blurring of past and present temporalities in Nelisiwe Xaba's The Venus (2009). In Chapter Five, Gavin Krastin's Rough Musick (2013), Sello Pesa's Limelight on Rites (2014) and Igshaan Adams' Bismillah (2014) are each examined as haunted temporalities where the living and the dead co-exist and affect one another.
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    Finding the spaces between forms: An inquiry into memory work through the intermedial interplay between media and presence
    (2023) Pilkington, Nicola; Pather, Jayendran
    This study sought to explicate my intermedial performance praxis as a theatre-maker, filmmaker and researcher. Intermedial performance practice was a generative way to respond to the gathering restrictions as a multidisciplinary artist during the Covid-19 pandemic; and a meaningful method to carry out a self-reflexive autoethnographic study about the frictions between embodied and recorded forms of memory. What emerged was an inquiry into the interplay between media and presence in memory work, which is the “conscious and purposeful staging of memory” as proposed by Kuhn Annette (2000: 186). Through a self-reflexive and responsive practice-as-research approach, I sought to frame and articulate the handling of my intermedial performance practice. I draw on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her notion of planetarity (2003, 2015, 2017) and similarly, Donna Harroway and her motion toward Staying with the Trouble (2016), toward complex networking, alliance, and entanglement; through engagement in worldings and play in order to open up possibilities. Working within a worlding that premised on specificity, multiplicity and plurality, I draw on Walter Mignolo's idea of empowering the utterance as a mode of placing the subjective self in all the work I have generated throughout the course. My formal inquiry into my intermedial performance practice began largely in response to the alienation caused by the global pandemic. I was prompted to interrogate ideas of intimacy and tactility at a time of physical distance. This took the form of an online process with Hlabi Moetanalo and resulted in the output of an interactive zine that unlocks digital performances through QR codes. This investigation gained scope and sought to reflect on how the continued separation effects community. Through an online process with Shameelah Khan and Geoffrey Diver, gathering in the age of digitality was explored through an intermedial performance practice. This resulted in a live-streamed telematic performance (or what I call a Zoomformance), now remediated into an Instagram exhibition. These projects were titled, Hybrid but Human: Vol 1. (2021) and Hybrid but Human: Towards a digital dramaturgy (2021) respectively. As gathering restrictions started to ease, my focus turned to an autoethnographic study into memory work, made in response to the repository of personal family home videos. While autoethnographic performance and autoethnographic filmmaking are well theorised fields (with particular reference to Catherine Russell and Tami Spry), I sought to generate an autoethnographic text through an intermedial performance praxis. I wanted to probe the possibilities, frictions, and fissures between the memories stored in my family's home videos and the memories stored in my body. And thus I created a memory text, an intermedial performance work about my relationship to the stage, screen and utterances of self therein. This resulted in a 20-minute performance titled The Camera & I (2022)
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    How to Disappear: Disidentification and biomythography as tools for queering and querying oppressive identity politics
    (2020) Maroga, Kopano Tiyana; Pather, Jayendran
    In this paper I endeavor to chart the trajectory through my Practice as Research process into, and later development of, what eventually became a performance and literary work entitled Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations. The paper details in the first part, Modes of Disidentification, the practices of three black, interdisciplinary artists: Todd Gray, Sethembile Msezane and Athi-Patra Ruga operating at different intersections of black identity and how their practices exemplify different possibilities for disidentification in creative practice. Using the framework of queer cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz' Disidentifications (1984) as a theoretical base, I endeavor to explore the different techniques that these artists use in response, retaliation and, possibly, congruence to the politics of representation . In order to elucidate and experiment with these techniques I employ a Practice as 1 Research methodology that I unpack in the second half of the paper, Biomythography, critical fabulation and disidentification in Practice. In Biomythography, critical fabulation and disidentification in practice I engage the performance works I created during my masters in Theatre and Performance, namely Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations and icarus descent and illustrate how the theory of disidentification can be performed utilizing the techniques of biomythography (Lorde, 1982) and critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008) that gesture towards a complication of rigid identity theory. Underpinning this research is the desire to explore artistic techniques that complicate rigid, categorical identity theory and practices in the hope that these techniques can serve towards alternatives to and liberation from the social, categorical identity model inherited in Southern Africa through the colonial systems of identity based categorization.
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    I am also here: Invisible Insurrections in temporary autonomous zones – a haunting
    (2022) James, Qondiswa; Pather, Jayendran; Fleishman, Mark
    The research investigates experiments with the socio-political functions of public art interventions and suggests that these actions are temporary ruptures which create ‘invisible insurrections' in a context of hyper-surveillance. The paper draws from Hakim Bey's poetic anarchy, “Temporary Autonomous Zones”, and uses his theories to think through the potentially explosive overlaps between public space, live performance, and insurrection. By first locating a history of Worker's Culture in the South African context, the research locates itself within a particular context of class struggle. Reading Augusto Boal, and his Invisible Theatre, the research calls in Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies in an attempt to find a more suitable language, both abstract and concrete, to articulate the need for building solidarity. The study is also interested in the demarcations between theatre, performance art, and live art, and how to sit comfortably between these practice as research methods. To this end, through Mark Fleishman, the research proposes “dwelling” as a mode of performance for the public live art space especially in relation to revealing what is not visible in marginalised terrains. Here, the paper thinks through the possibility of reappropriating invisibility in the system as a cloak for haunting. Themes discussed in the research include insurrection as opposed to revolution; the scope of cultural work in general and the possibility of an emergent worker's culture in the present; the possibility of liberated zones inside the matrix as it is currently mapped; memory-being-made in relation to the archive; in/visibility in connection to ghostlikeness and haunting; collective precarity in system; and the importance of passing moments of ‘seeing each other' to building solidarity in our search for more human ways of being together.
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    Speculative indigeneities: the [k]new now
    (2019) Bhagat, Heeten; Pather, Jayendran; Sitas, Rike
    The starting point of this research study began with a broad and unwieldly question - what would Zimbabwe look like if colonisation didn’t happen? This question arose with regard to the launch of the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act (IEEA) in 2007 and is focused of on building an understanding of notions of indigeneity in Zimbabwe through an inquiry of indigenousness and indigenisation. The methodological approach is designed as an interdisciplinary and experimental research inquiry that processes these debates and proposes an expansion of the probabilities of notions of indigeneity within the range of existing socio-political, economic and historical analyses of indigenousness and indigenisation in Zimbabwe. This exploration begins with a broad historical, anthropological and etymological survey of the term 'indigenous’ that is interwoven with a contextual account of Zimbabwe and its socio-political lifespan. The primary site of investigation is the independence-day ceremony that took place at the National Sports Stadium in Harare, Zimbabwe on the 18th of April 2017. This focus is motivated by two distinctive elements at this event - a banner that declares 'ZIMBABWE WILL NEVER BE A COLONY AGAIN’ and a fragment from the president’s speech that asserts, 'we can now call ourselves full masters of our destiny’ (Mugabe 2017). This event stands as a crucial node for the debates and questions this research aims to pose regarding notions of indigenisation, indigenousness and registers of indigeneity. Political and socio-economic analyses of this annual ritual tower above the lacuna of analysis of its performance logics. This performance-specific inquiry aims to contribute new meanings and complexity around the event. The information generated from this reading is further processed through the mechanisms of speculative research as a way to think beyond the dilemmas and paradoxes that emerge from the historical, anthropological and performance analyses of this event. The penultimate chapter of this dissertation suggests a conceptual rehearsal of the findings generated through an expanded understanding of queer theory. The final articulation of 2 this research investigation extends the experimental approach, presenting a set of visual, aural and sculptural elements as the conclusion. The dissertation offers alternate readings of notions of homogeneity and singularity. It is also constituted as a way to understand the probability of building new knowledges through lateral and rhizomic processes as a journey that gathers and synthesizes from across a number of disciplines. The contention of this thesis, then, is to suggest an expansion of the notion of indigeneity towards the possibility of polygeneity, a notion that aims to align with the conceptual constructs of cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2006, Kleingeld and Brown 2014), which engage arguments for expanded understandings of contemporary identity formation. Embodied in this suggestion of polygeneity lies the potential to revive notions of dynamism and creativity that have been dormant since the onset of European colonisation in Zimbabwe. In the wake of the 'new dawn’ in Zimbabwe, in this moment of growing debates for alternatives, the thesis finds its impulse in the imperative for radical and creative shifts in consciousness to activate new ideas, new readings, and new knowledges.
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    The Ngoma Consciousness: IsiNgqi neSandi as existing and accessible tools for healing and therapy in Africa
    (2025) Koela, Nkosenathi; Ramugondo, Elelwani; Pather, Jayendran; Bam-Hutchison, June
    This thesis explores the ritual archive of isingqi (energy, rhythm and vibration) used in Ngoma (the divination arts and ecology) through ingoma (traditional sound and chants) as accessible tools for healing and therapy. Ngoma, etymologically, is a proto-Bantu term for an African praxis within which exists an ecology of related institutions such as the practice of medicine, divination, crafts, music, and ritual. Central in this thesis is the systemic dispossession and destruction of indigene ecologies of healing in South Africa as a result of coloniality, which De Sousa Santos (2015) unpacks through the framework of epistimicide and I unpack through the framework of ecolocide and musicolocide. The central question this thesis seeks to answer is: How is ritual involving isingqi used and preserved in the divination arts of/through ingoma (traditional sound and chants)? The overall objective is to unpack and explore this African (Ngoma) philosophical praxis and its related ecology of knowledge, through the applied method of ritual music as vibrations of healing in Southern Africa, and to offer an informed and decolonial use of ritual technologies such as ingoma and isingqi. To do this, I draw from inter-disciplinary research and archival literature that explores various epistemologies and uses of sound in African indigene communities. I also use the existing ritual archive of Ngoma and its modalities through a co-operative co-design method. The practical elements of my research provide a repository within which to explore some of the possibilities of Ngoma as consciousness, an ecology of divination arts, and praxis in the current context. This thesis argues that African indigenous scholars must engage deeply with African epistemologies like Ngoma to develop authentic technologies and healing modalities that can enrich South Africa's cultural and healing ecology. Doing so may help reinstate African- conscious institutions of healing in various sectors of society and introduce hybrid forms of sound therapy and psychosomatic treatments, involving unique healing methods through Ngoma rhythmic manipulation. My findings argue for a clear distinction between performance studies and indigene ritual studies. This distinction can provide a platform for interdisciplinary models of scholarship that enrich indigene knowledge systems and encourage research into African healing praxes.
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    Touching on the Untouchable: contesting contemporary Black south african masculinity and cultural identity through performance
    (2021) Dubazane, Mlondiwethu; Pather, Jayendran
    As a moment of slipping in, turning away and recovering from; the thinking for this project is focused on understanding through and from within culture. With this the paper begins to weave itself through a guided journey of my own personal accounts and the theorists that align and/or challenge such accounts. It moves between investigating my relationship with my father, to interrogating the ways in which men have spoken specific violence's into existence. This thesis does not look to be the reason of, nor the answer to, the way in which men ‘act'; but it does employ a keen eye into understanding the way in which meanings are produced. The paper then embeds itself in interrogating each of these instances through four different performances that were created by Mlondi Dubazane. These performances should be understood as thinking through and with/in representation and the different mediums that representing takes shape. It is vital to understand that even in its attempt at the poetics, the paper expresses itself through, within, around and beside language. This is but the first attempt of finding a language in speaking about my own maleness, a maleness that is not universal, a maleness that is moving forward in advance of nowhere, a maleness that seeks to dare touch on the untouchable. This, then serves as a written explication of research that seeks to engage the meanings and limitations of contemporary Black south african cultural identity (and in particular, the gendered dimensions of this experience) through the careful and nuanced crafting of public performances that draw on both public and intimate experiences.