Browsing by Department "School of Dance"

Now showing 1 - 16 of 16
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    A South African perspective on professional ballet dancers' career transitions (2018 - 2021)
    (2023) Dean, Amy Denise; Samuel, Gerard M; Wilson, Lisa
    The discourse of dancers' and career transitions has significantly increased since the 1980s, and much of the literature views the topic of dancers and career transitions from European, American and Australian perspectives. No literature from a South African perspective was found, and this research dissertation aims to fill this gap. This research explores the phenomenon of a dancer's career transition from a South African perspective through a microcosm - four interviews conducted with former professional ballet dancers from a single ballet company. The aim was to answer the main research question; What is the experience of South African ballet dancers transitioning from a full-time professional stage performing career to alternative careers or roles? A Phenomenological case study was applied to explore and identify the former dancer's transition experiences. Qualitative data was gathered through in-depth interviews with four former dancers who had been employed full-time by a single company in the Western Cape, South Africa. The transcripts of the data collected were analysed using thematic analysis, and four themes emerged: 1. Loss, grief and coping processes. 2. Preparation for an exit. 3. Support systems. 4. South African experience versus outside South Africa experience. Several established theories and models were used to underpin the interpretations and understandings of the experiences of these former dancers. These include Irina Roncaglia's Career Transition Model for Ballet Dancers (Roncaglia, 2006), Colin Murray Parkes' Psychosocial Transition Theory (1998), Margret Stroebe and Henk Schut's Dual-process Model of Coping and Bereavement (1995), Britton Brewer, Judy Van Raalte and Darwyn Linder's Athletic Identity (1993), and Carolyn Cutrona and Daniel Russell's ideas on types of Social Support (1990) along with an exploration on the profile of South African dancers. The research demonstrates that even though South African ballet dancers find themselves in different training and performing environments compared to their European, American and Australian counterparts, the experiences of dancers' transitioning out of a professional stage performing career have similar themes yet are unique for each individual. The research also comments on suggestions to improve South African dancers' experiences while considering the socio-economic climate of Dance in South Africa. Recommendations for further study are made, borne from the limitations and findings of this research. In closing, although zoomed into experiences from a single ballet company, the four themes provide an answer to the research question, which allows for a new perspective (South African) to be added to the already established dialogue of dancers and career transitions.
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    An analysis of three choreographic works : old friends, sacred spirits and cool wind blowing
    (2002) Raizenberg, Lindy; Samantha Pienaar
    My choreographic career commenced in 1975 when my first work, Aexia, was presented as part of a third year choreographic examination at undergraduate level. Between 1979 and 2000, I created a number of dance works for CAPAB Ballet Company (now Cape Town City Ballet Company) and the University of Cape Town Ballet School (now UCT School of Dance). The works were all choreographed in a classical ballet style in which I was trained from the age of five. The ballets were most often created in an abstract form where interpretation of music into movement formed the primary motivation. Against this background, the creation of a portfolio of three dance works submitted for the Masters Degree in Choreography at this time has become part of a personal process of choreographic development beyond the traditional classical dance style with which I am so familiar, towards a more modem contemporary style of dance which I anticipated would offer me new avenues of creativity.
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    Butoh-Ballet
    (2014) Job, Jacqueline Felicity; Samuel, Gerard
    This dissertation explores intercultural theory through an investigation of butoh methods that shift performance processes of ballet. Theories of Post colonialism and Performance have been interrogated and applied to distill a theme, Butoh-Ballet. A qualitative research approach was undertaken for this study following a short series of dance workshops in butoh carried out on four members of Cape Town City Ballet company, in Cape Town, in 2013. This dissertation will show how butoh could contribute to overcoming colonial constructs, which have penetrated all spheres of South African society including Dance and its discourse. Dance research is fairly new in South Africa and largely situated within Contemporary dance. Ballet in South Africa has received relatively less critical analysis. The dissertation is particularly focused on expanding worldviews beyond a Eurocentric bias. Feminist notions as explicated by Ketu Katrak and Rustom Bharucha are considered in parallel to the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I also borrowed from Gayatri Spivak's notion of 'decolonising the imagination', to suggest that butoh may provide a means for ballet to re-imagine the body and its performance. This study acknowledges my subjective, 'endarkened' voice that emanates from my hybrid identity as Coloured, woman, pioneer Butoh artist, in postapartheid South Africa. I have proposed that butoh balances an external focus of the body found in ballet, with a more spiritually nuanced approach found in butoh. My argument hopefully marks the earliest reflective analysis of the subtle shifts butoh could make to ballet in South Africa today.
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    Challenges to dance teacher education : interrogating the training of dance teachers at the UCT School of Dance 2001-2008
    (2008) Friedman, Sharon; Samuel, Gerard; Loots, Lliane
    Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-119).
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    Dancing the Other in South Africa
    (2016) Samuel, Gerard M; Swartz, Sally; Freire, Ida Mara
    At the centre of discourse of Dance in South Africa is the notion of Other. The form and approach in Contemporary Dance in South Africa in the 21st century has been shaped by cultural forces such as apartheid and colonialism. This thesis sets out a phenomenological study of Othering in Dance in South Africa through a hermeneutical unpacking of 'Older dancing'. Its critical question grapples with the notion of age as a new marker of alterity in Dance and asks: How does dancing the Other bring new ways of seeing bodies? The lived experiences of four categories in Older dancing: dancers, choreographers, directors and dance critics, in and outside of South Africa since the 2000s, will be analysed. My own position in each of the categories above has allowed me to participate in Contemporary Dance and the performing arts field in South Africa for over 45 years. A partial history of Contemporary Dance in South Africa is explicated in order to provide paradigmatic frames for this study. The philosophical enquiry of this thesis has foregrounded Dance Studies as a discrete research field in order to highlight dance and the body itself, and to reassert an enviable position of dancing bodies as research instruments and knowledge producers. A hermeneutical narrative analysis was deployed following twelve interviews that were conducted over 4 years (2012-2014). Seven South African and five non-South African 'voices' were analysed and coded against four primary lines of enquiry in Experience: notions of cultural inscription and dancing bodies as blank slates; questions of (in)visibility and frailty of older persons, wisdom and (in)dependent older dancers and the ontologies of marginalisation for Older dancing within concert theatre Dance. This suggested a thesis of wider Body-space reading and continuum for Dance that could be useful in understanding epistemology of prejudice. Recommendations that flow from this study will relate to Dance Studies in South Africa that is already moving away from its anthropological roots in tribal dances, experimentations with multicultural dance, towards unpacking intersectionality, public art and the contested label African dance. It provides Body-space as a further theoretical tool with which to observe dancing and bodies as states of becoming that will be of interest to Dance Studies, Performance Theory and Cultural Studies.
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    Flamenco in South Africa: outsider in two places
    (2012) Holden, Carolyn; Samuel, Gerard; Baum, Rob
    This dissertation interrogates the notion of flamenco identity in order to establish a case for the existence of a legitimate flamenco identity outside of Spain, and specifically in South Africa. Verification of the existence of a legitimate flamenco sub-culture in South Africa would add gravitas to the practise of flamenco by South Africans (as well as other outsiders across the globe), helping to shift the unspoken parameters governing who has the right to teach and perform flamenco, and which criteria might be used to decide this.
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    Frank Staff and his role in South African ballet and musical theatre from 1955 to 1959, including a pre-1955 biography
    (1998) Rosen, Gary; Tuffin, Michael
    Frank Staff was the first South African choreographer to explore the concept of modem ballet in South Africa. Through the creation of his ballet companies, the South African Ballet and later the Frank Staff Ballet, he pursued unusual subject-matter not seen previously on a South African ballet stage. This thesis explores his legacy to South African dance and is divided into ten chapters with a separate introduction and conclusion. The aim, from the outset, has been to trace Frank Staff's career with particular reference to his choreographic contribution to ballet and musical theatre in South Africa. Appraised throughout in terms of critical opinion and dancers' commentaries, the study is chronologically based with emphasis on individual works created by Staff. There is an overview of Staff's early career, the rationale being to trace the earlier part of his career (from 1933 to 1952) in order to provide a basis from which Staff's most creative phase, i.e. that of the 1950's, might be explored. Staff's subsequent return to South Africa and possible reasons for choosing Johannesburg as his domicile are alluded to, as well as his vision for a new Johannesburg ballet company, the creation of the Frank Staff Ballet School and the South African Ballet Company. The South African Ballet's first regional tour to Benoni followed by a short tour to Kimberley and Vereeniging before returning to Pretoria for further performances is detailed and an examination of the South African Ballet's second Johannesburg season in November 1955 is made. An investigation into Staff's choreographic contribution to Leslie French's 1956 Johannesburg production of The Tempest as well as Staff's early involvement with Brian Brooke's musical theatre encapsulates his important contribution to South African musical theatre, which was a major interest throughout his life. 1957 was the most important and prolific period for Staff and his latest choreographic achievements demonstrates a broadening of his creative powers and a reaching out for previously unused influences in terms of dance and subject matter. The thesis' conclusion includes some of the possible frustrations Staff might have encountered as a choreographer working in South Africa during the 1960's and alludes to his Afro-centric works before his illness and untimely death in 1971.
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    I'm not going back to the Township; Re-imagining 'trauma' as tragedy.
    (2023) Hlongwane, Thapelo; Fleishman, Mark; Mbothwe Mandla
    In the place of wound, healing must take place. But how do you heal if you're presently living in a wound? How do you heal if you have lost touch with the other? This research responds to trauma through the tragic form of theatre, it understands tragedy as a means in performance to try to foster healing using the practice of performance as a mode of research. It argues that as a practice, theatre making in the South African context is affected by traumatic experience and to engage with trauma, requires social and historical relations to be considered. The research focuses on how African oral traditions, modern poetics and music might be used as a process of re-imagining the tragic form and utilising it to better understand how theatre making can hold space and safely lead the process of healing without re-traumatizing the participants.
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    Interrogating the nature, process and politics of female headed dance collaborations: the growth project (Scenkonst Sӧrmland, Sweden & Baxter Theatre Centre, Cape Town, South Africa) 2012-2016
    (2017) Valentine, Bernice; Samuel, Gerard M
    This dissertation seeks to investigate the nature of Contemporary Dance collaborations between some South African dancers in the Western Cape and Swedish musicians and dancers and their directors and producers. My study focusses on the impact of choreographic processes in such collaborations when these are led by women. In particular, I will examine a collaboration herein referred to as the Growth Project that was undertaken between the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town, South Africa and Scenkonst Sörmland Theatre in Sweden between 2012-2016. The study aims to provide insight into such collaborative dance practices in order to highlight gendered practices in Dance in the Western Cape. It will outline all three parts of the Growth Project but focuses on the dance work I hit the ground running (2013), in which I performed. This dissertation considered the historical context, and political legacy of key individuals associated with the Growth Project in order to examine their views of the artistic world, their relationship to one another and what inform choreographic processes when working in Contemporary Dance in the Western Cape. When artist collaborate, there is an interplay between identity, culture and politics and issues of power and gender all add to the complexity of dance collaborations. This dissertation problematises the birth of Contemporary Dance in South Africa and focusses on the region of the Western Cape arguing that in the 2000s, colonial and apartheid history continues to support a gender inequality in South African Dance as well as in society in general. Chapter One positions myself as an emic and etic researcher and provides an overview of the influences that impacted the development of Contemporary Dance in South Africa especially in the Western Cape. With this as background, I discuss my rationale for an interrogation of collaborative dance practices between some South Africans and certain foreigners. I highlight certain gaps such as analysis of contemporary dance works by women in South African Dance Literature. Chapters Two and Three discuss the concept of collaboration and draw some distinctions between the genders, for example, when women collaborate. It focuses on economic and patriarchal modes of power in society and the manner in which these are perpetuated in dance. It acknowledges feminist theories found in Social Sciences and Humanities that are also extended in Dance Studies such as the work of Katrak (2006), Butler (1999) and Daly (2002). I reflect on the response of some South African dancing bodies to collaborative practices in Contemporary Dance and add my comments to the views on this topic already expressed by Loots (2012), Craighead (2007) amongst others. Chapter Four highlights the research methods used during this study and explains how the process of the interview was engaged with to collect data. This sourcing of data included my own reflections as a participant and observer, as well as an analysis of journalistic material (press reviews), and programme notes. I also critically unpack my own reflective journals. My unique etic and emic perspectives, as I am simultaneously the researcher as well as one of the dancers in I hit the ground running (2013), will be discussed. This research also gave rise to a number of findings which have been framed as challenges encountered by dancers, musicians, the choreographer and management teams involved in I hit the ground running (2013). The study reflects on the notion of femaleness in Contemporary Dance itself, and the impact that such femaleness has on dance making/Contemporary Dance choreography. The connections between femaleness as a form of discrimination and other forms of marginalisation such as race and cultural groups is explored. This is contested within South African and Swedish world views in the 21st century. This dissertation suggests that a feminist notion of dance making is a useful tool to understand South African and Swedish Contemporary Dance. It may extend the work of other dance researchers wanting to write about other marginalised groups for example disability dance in South Africa and Sweden.
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    Looking at dance through the Te Whare Tapa Wha model of health
    (2011) Thorp, Kathryn; Samuel, Gerard; Baum, Rob
    This dissertation uses Mason Durie's Te Whare Tapa Wha (the house of four sides) model of health to examine the benefits of participating in dance. Durie's (1994) model is widely used and taught throughout Aotearoa New Zealand as a guide for discussions and practices involving total health and wellbeing. The four sides of the house are: taha wairua, the spiritual aspect of health; taha whānau, social aspect; taha hinengaro, mental and emotional aspect; and taha tinana, the physical aspect; each of which will be applied to circumstances, situations, and phenomena found in dance. Each aspect of health, although they stand alone in their own right, is interconnected with, and relies on the other. Dance is a place to explore, understand, and come to know oneself and others in each aspect of health; as dance is a holistically healthy activity which empowers an individual in life, as it reflects and amplifies issues, perceptions, and ideas, and is a place to explore those issues. Dance enhances the sense of spirituality and connection to one's self, others, and the environment. This occurs through muscular bonding, use of the shared breath, and the feeling of connectedness between people when honouring and embodying one's ancestors and history through movement. The dance community can also be a surrogate family, through developing how one builds and maintains relationships by building rapport, caring for others, and creating a sense of belonging within the group. Dance improves the ability to think through the body, and is a site for physically maintaining and improving the body.
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    Lost meaning-new traditions : an investigation into the effects of modernity on African social traditional dance in Nyanga, Cape Town.
    (2013) Rani, Maxwell Xolani; Greyling, Eduard
    The dancers of Nyanga have taken note of the extent to which modernity has caused them to adjust and transform the movement quality and execution of their dances to create new urban African social dances. In addition, the urban dancers' experiences in the field have affected and influenced their craft. These perspectives have served as a point of departure for a re-evaluation of the role and predicaments of African social traditional dance in an urban environment, with specific reference to Nyanga township and raises questions around the manner in which modern agencies such as Christianity, education, multimedia, fashion and geography influence South African social traditional dance.
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    Navigating choreographic transitions through the use of personal narrative and storytelling an investigation into the choreographic process and performance of 'I stumble every time (2010)'
    (2011.) Rodrigues, Jamila Pacheco; Samuel, Gerard; Collins, Lindy
    This dissertation aims to analyse the choreographic processes during the making of the dance theatre performance ‘ I stumble every time...’ which was performed as part of my Masters in Choreography as a practical examination held, at Joseph Stone Auditorium in Cape Town, South Africa in October 2010.
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    Oudano as praxis: archives, audiotopias and movements
    (2023) Sakaria, Nashilongweshipwe; Mtshali, Mbongeni; Hamilton Carolyn
    Several Namibian studies have looked at Oudano as an expansive Oshiwambo and Rukwangali concept that implies utterances of play, performance, and performativity in spheres of culture, sports, religion, and politics. This thesis offers experiments that explore the critical usefulness of Oudano. I embark on these experiments in a deliberately undisciplined way, crossing media, time periods, ethnicities, geographies, and emphasising embodiment and mobility. In the process I show how Oudano is a practice of critical orientation in various respects, by looking at cultural work that questions institutional constraints and exclusions. This study departs from the disjuncture between cultural work that is authorised by hegemonic national heritage discourse and unauthorised cultural work in action, offering other ways of knowing with different aims that slide into the cracks, between and outside of power. The disjuncture endorses structural disparities that are a direct result of a cultural hegemony, its aims and exertion of power. I was motivated by a deep anxiety caused by Namibia's post-apartheid dominant epistemologies that fundamentally exclude indigenous and subaltern methods of knowledge production. This thesis was aimed at finding a range of conceptual and methodological approaches for critical consciousness and radical imagination across place and time. I made a choice to focus on a set of ‘unrelated objects' which include my cultural practices and those of other cultural workers in Namibia. African queer and performance theories are interfaced with Oudano to demonstrate the relatedness of these objects. The objects gathered and analysed in this study were given status of archive to point to their role of memory making in social and cultural movements. Methodologically, I relied on Archival research and Practice-as-Research (P-aR) to interweave my (performance and curatorial) practice and historical research. The thesis is a collection of six papers divided in two movements which offer specific insights about the various objects of analysis. These objects include lino-cut prints, rock art, colonial photography and sonic archives, performance art, museum theatre, site-related performance, jazz, struggle music, HipHop, Kwaito, Shambo, documentary film, orature, oral history, protest action, as well as curatorial practice. Given its epistemic potential, Oudano is a generative approach of decolonising our understandings of performance cultures. Through close reading and listening to works of Oudano produced in Namibia, I demonstrate how people have historically practiced Oudano to construct audiotopic imaginations and build social movements. While this offers decolonial lessons for both performance and archivality, Oudano is an indigenous framework of preserving and queering knowledge. In that sense, a queer understanding of Oudano exceeds geo-political and ethnic borders, signifying how it has historically accompanied historic migrations of artists and material culture, as well as activists and non-normative ideas. By reading Oudano across time allowed this study to interrupt periodisation, showing Oudano's potential as a trans-temporal practice. Overall, this study contributes to the long- existing gap of performance studies as a field in Namibian studies. It pays attention to overlooked archives of cultural work, most of which have hardly received any scholarly attention. The thesis exceeds my disciplinary training of drama and theatre, demonstrating Oudano as an intellectual praxis that is leaky, slippery, and undisciplined.
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    The [un]knowing director: a critical examination of directing within the context of devising performance
    (2022) Thulo, Kabi; Fleishman, Mark; Sitas, Ari
    This thesis is a critical examination of directing within the context of devising performance practice. It emanates from my need to make sense of the particular ways in which I work as a theatre director who engages with devising performance coupled with an identified lack in the literature that speaks to directing and devising performance from a Southern African perspective. The notion of the [un]knowing director is posited as the central concept that is evidently plausible for the particular context of devising performance practice argued for in the thesis. The key argument expressed in this thesis is that [un]knowing is a way of knowing realised through intuition and collaboration as co-constitutive or symbiotic aspects applicable to the study's particular contexts of directing and devising performance practice. To be more specific, the study investigates how the [un]knowing director makes artistic discoveries and decisions/choices during the moment-to-moment unfolding of a devising process. The notion of the [un]knowing is conceptually explicated by drawing from Tim Ingold's ideas of wayfaring and wayfinding (2000 & 2011), Henri Bergson's (1907) philosophical conception of time understood as duration, and Leopold Senghor's Africanist philosophy that speaks of rhythmic attitude, reason-eye and reason embrace (Diagne, 2019). This thesis is located within the sphere of nonrepresentational theory and purports for knowledge, within the context of directing and devising performance, as an undertaking that is non-predetermined and emergent in character. In terms of its methodology, this study is generally located within the methodological terrain of qualitative research and specifically employs practice as research. Specifically, its methodology entailed a structured questionnaire responded to by seven Southern African devising performance directors. The questionnaire's general research aim was to identify the plausibility of the [un]knowing director concept based on other director's experiences of devising performance. Thereafter, three creative research projects in the form of devising performance processes, were undertaken. These projects served as related case studies constituting an investigative cycle. The research method of autoethnographical devising session note-taking and reflective accounts was used in generating the necessary data through the creative research projects. Essentially, this thesis concludes that the [un]knowing director knows through intuition and collaboration in ways that are particular to its critical examination of directing and devising performance. These two ways of knowing are complex in their nature and characterised by the elements of initiation, facilitation and decision making during the moment-to-moment unfolding of a devising session. Relatedly, this thesis refers to the [un]knowing director's momentary undertakings as the molecular, micro and macro levels of artistic activity. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that the [un]knowing director has a complex genealogy emanating from the Southern African oral performance tradition. Thus, the [un]knowing director's practice is story-like and significantly affected by time.
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    Theatres of migritude: towards a dramaturgy of African futures
    (2023) Mwenya, Kabwe Beverly; Fleishman, Mark
    The thesis aims to contribute to the genre of black migrant cultural production called migritude, developed largely in African diasporic literary circles and tracing its evolution from the Négritude movement. It will mobilize Shailja Patel's significant work to shape a new migritude that stands in continuation and in contestation with the older version of this artistic project. The research question at the heart of the thesis is, what does it mean to have a migrant attitude for theatre and performance making? The thesis explores an approach to thinking about how a relationship between migration and African futurism can be put towards a dramaturgical practice mobilized in the direction of possibility, potential and a more hopeful future. The quest undertaken here is to find out what alternative understandings of African migrancy exist in the spirit of the five case studies, namely Migritude by Shailja Patel, Every Year, Every Day I am Walking by Magnet Theatre, Moj of the Antartctic: An African Odyssey by Mojisola Adebayo, Afrogalactica Deep Space Scrolls by Kapwani Kiwanga and Astronautus Afrikanus, devised by a group of students at Rhodes University under my direction. By analysing each of these performance texts through a different lens, the thesis aims to develop a pliable dramaturgical framework for a migrant attitude which leverages some of the aesthetic features of migritude artistic work as noted by Vanita Reddy (2020). These include defining Africa by movement, linking the concept of migrant with the concept of colonial history and the diasporic refusal of return. Here a migrant attitude also includes Thomas Nail (2015) and Veejay Prashad's (2010) contentions that the migrant is central to a project of social re-imagining, as well as Mark Fleishman's (2015) notion of a dramaturgy of displacement where movement and migration form a core part of both the form and content of the work.