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Reviewed by:
  • Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa ed. by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle, and: Body Politics: Fingerprinting South African Contemporary Dance by Adrienne C. Sichel
  • Megan Lewis
Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa. Edited by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019; pp. 372.
Body Politics: Fingerprinting South African Contemporary Dance. By Adrienne C. Sichel. Pinegowrie, ZA: Porcupine Press, 2018; pp. 234.

Twenty-five years after the historic transition of power in 1994 South Africa is in the throes of decolonization and wrestling with the process of democratization. The 2015 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements jolted the country into conversations around affordable access to education, decolonizing the academy, whose version of history will be taught in universities, and in which of eleven official languages. Two new publications out this year offer vitally important interventions to the scholarship, showcasing the power and potential of performance in the process of democracy and bringing the work of South African artists, especially movers and shakers of color, to international audiences. These are invaluable resources for theatre history educators teaching non-Western performance, as well as inspirations for practitioners worldwide.

In Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa, coeditors Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle chronicle how South African artists are “search[ing] for a different language—a corporeal vocabulary of seepage and excess—to articulate the distention of the time” (1). Born out of the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, this groundbreaking collection of fifteen essays documents the diversity and scope of the country’s live art repertoire, which they claim “is born of extremity” and whose “affective tenor of excess and irrationality embodies the unpredictability of crisis” (2). It articulates a decidedly Afro-centric history of experimental performance, situated within a “precolonial and decolonial African genealogy of ritual, ruptures and experimentality, refuting the notion that South African live art is a western import” (3).

The book is structured in four parts: the essays in the first section, titled “Live Art in Times of Crisis,” by Nomusa Makhubu, Sarah Nutall, Catherine Boulle, and Jay Pather, respectively, examine live art against the backdrop of the complexities and turbulent times of the young democracy. It addresses the lingering whiteness of the culture at multiple levels of society, the abiding segregation of public spaces, and the sense of unbelonging, placelessness, disruption, and ambivalence that result in these contested times. Nutall theorizes these times as a state of “upsurge,” when acts of defiance brutally confront and disassemble existing norms (43).

Through an examination of works by Chuma Sopotela and Buhlebezwe Siwani (These Ghels, 2017), Khanyisile Mbongwa (kuDanger!, 2017), and Dean Hurtton (#fuckwhitepeople, 2017), Makhubu frames live art as “a question of citizenship” through which to understand “belonging and governance” (21). For Makhubu, performance art offers a counter balance to the anatopism of contemporary urban spaces, the feeling of “being un-homed and made to feel out of place” (36). In his essay on the ethics of fostering the kind of live art described by others in this section, Pather calls for a new form of curation-as-mediation, aimed at generating platforms “to give life to new works that are probing and provocative while remaining speculative and unknowable” (103).

The second section—“Loss, Language and Embodiment”—focuses on the black female body as a site of contestation, trauma, resistance, and creative potentials. Lieketso Dee Mohoto-wa Thaluki begins with an interview with artist-activist Chuma Sopotela about her 2013–14 performance piece Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda (The chicken has laid its eggs), which Thaluki suggests is an embodied, socially situated articulation of a black feminist language (108). [End Page 180] Next is Gabrielle Goliath’s essay about Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama’s use of performance to “resist the erasure and violation of bodies” (125). Goliath excavates these artists’ use of invocation, absence, and loss toward a kind of public mourning and grievance that resists the ways in “black, brown, queer and vulnerable bodies” are traumatized, rendered either invisible or hyper-visible.

The intersections of performance and protest, emergence and transformation are unpacked by Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga in her essay about Mamela Nyamza...

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