Isililo sikaNandi: imagining dithyrambic dirge to performatively score the precarity of blackwomnhood

Nkonyeni, Zamah Martiniah

Isililo sikaNandi: imagining dithyrambic dirge to performatively score the precarity of blackwomnhood

Master Thesis

2022

Abstract

This study is an exploration of an embodied awareness and the plethora of ways in which what I am ‘falls short' - in relation to being “fully human” (Lugónes, 2010:743). It serves as the creative stimulus to actively explore and resist the ontological arrest of my blackwomnhood. This work aspires towards a kind of social and embodied resistance by means of “deserting exceptionality” (Gqola, 2004:61). As a form of survival, as well as of repairing the ruptured fragments of my being, I want to redefine, for myself, through performance, what it means to be a young, South African, working-class, queer blackwomn. This study therefore necessitates a distinction between ‘who' I am and ‘what' I am through exploring what Adriana Cavarero refers to as the ‘narratable self' (2005: x) in conjunction with Barbara Boswell's ‘creative re-visioning' (2010:1) and what Audre Lorde defines as ‘autobiomythography' (Lorde, 1996). In order to do this, the study employs a Practice as Research approach to explore alternative ways of staging heterogeneous experiences of blackwomnhood using the plurality of voice as a performance mode/tool. This study further reflects on a series of performance projects (as part of the present MA) to interrogate and reflect critically on the scale and complexity of the work/s. Following Cavarero (2005: x), Boswell (2010:1) and Lorde (1996), I explore the oral historical narratives and timelines of Zulu matriarch, Queen Nandi, to imagine a dithyrambic dirge drawn from blackwomn's experiences of ruptures, reckonings and refusals.

Keywords

theatre perfomance

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