Performing the archive as interdisciplinary artistic-educational process
- Authors: Parker, Alan , Samuel, G M
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469151 , vital:77214 , ISBN 9781000768770
- Description: Since 2015, South African tertiary education institutions have been deeply embroiled in processes of re-thinking pedagogies and curricula, spurred by calls for decolonial change by young student-led, national movements such as# Rhodesmustfall and# Feesmustfall. In the field of performance studies and practice, this has initiated a welcomed re-imagining of how teaching and learning occur within the performing arts in South Africa where diverse disciplines, forms, histories and discourses, connecting to a wide range of both indigenous and global contexts, combine in the training of multi-skilled, critically aware performers, theatre-makers, educators and researchers. At the University of Cape Town, in particular, this process has been complemented by the recent merger between the School of Dance and the Department of Drama into the newly formed Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies. Through this merging of artistic disciplines, the decolonial re-thinking of teaching and learning has been augmented by a significant move towards artistic interdisciplinarity and a strong focus on experimentation and research within performancemaking practices. As educators and choreographers working within this particular context, we have found the intersection between “choreographic performance”(Cvejić, 2015, p. 14) 1 and the archive to be a particularly rich and open field of possibility where critical questions can be asked, through the body, about the relationality between the past and the present and where tacit ideologies, socio-cultural belief systems and geopolitical perspectives, often implicit in bodies and their behaviours, can be surfaced and openly critiqued.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2023
- Authors: Parker, Alan , Samuel, G M
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469151 , vital:77214 , ISBN 9781000768770
- Description: Since 2015, South African tertiary education institutions have been deeply embroiled in processes of re-thinking pedagogies and curricula, spurred by calls for decolonial change by young student-led, national movements such as# Rhodesmustfall and# Feesmustfall. In the field of performance studies and practice, this has initiated a welcomed re-imagining of how teaching and learning occur within the performing arts in South Africa where diverse disciplines, forms, histories and discourses, connecting to a wide range of both indigenous and global contexts, combine in the training of multi-skilled, critically aware performers, theatre-makers, educators and researchers. At the University of Cape Town, in particular, this process has been complemented by the recent merger between the School of Dance and the Department of Drama into the newly formed Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies. Through this merging of artistic disciplines, the decolonial re-thinking of teaching and learning has been augmented by a significant move towards artistic interdisciplinarity and a strong focus on experimentation and research within performancemaking practices. As educators and choreographers working within this particular context, we have found the intersection between “choreographic performance”(Cvejić, 2015, p. 14) 1 and the archive to be a particularly rich and open field of possibility where critical questions can be asked, through the body, about the relationality between the past and the present and where tacit ideologies, socio-cultural belief systems and geopolitical perspectives, often implicit in bodies and their behaviours, can be surfaced and openly critiqued.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2023
Twelve (Queer) Labours: The mundane as catalyst for the archiving of queer transgressive joy
- Authors: Parker, Alan
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469140 , vital:77213 , https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2295727
- Description: In the first six months of 2022, the small South African town of Makhanda became the location for a series of queer public performance interventions. These interventions were framed as acts of civic labour and involved a diverse group of queer artists, students and allies labouring alongside local artisans and citizens. The project, entitled 12 Labours, was conceived by performance artist Gavin Krastin, and created in collaboration with the collective of labourers, who appeared, guerrilla-style, dressed as garden gnomes in brightly coloured overalls and with pointed hats, in several public places throughout the town. During these once-off interventions, the gnomes would work together, often for several hours, performing a range of mundane tasks for an incidental audience of passers-by. This paper positions the project as a departure point for wider consideration of some of the ways in which mundane acts of public labour, when approached as opportunities for queer performance, can become spaces for the expression of queer transgressive joy. The discussion critically reflects on three of the twelve labours: the communal repainting of a bus stop, the planting of a public garden and the laying of flowers in a derelict cemetery, as a means to consider how the public performance of mundane tasks by queer artists presents an intriguing opportunity for the performance of queer joy, and Black queer joy in particular, in contexts and spaces not typically associated with queerness and with queer bodies. The discussion also considers how the archiving of these labours, as a public exhibition of filmed documentation, constitutes an ‘archive of feelings’ (Cvetkovich 2003) that seeks to document experiences conjured through the performance of mundane labour, rather than merely archiving the act itself.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2023
- Authors: Parker, Alan
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469140 , vital:77213 , https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2295727
- Description: In the first six months of 2022, the small South African town of Makhanda became the location for a series of queer public performance interventions. These interventions were framed as acts of civic labour and involved a diverse group of queer artists, students and allies labouring alongside local artisans and citizens. The project, entitled 12 Labours, was conceived by performance artist Gavin Krastin, and created in collaboration with the collective of labourers, who appeared, guerrilla-style, dressed as garden gnomes in brightly coloured overalls and with pointed hats, in several public places throughout the town. During these once-off interventions, the gnomes would work together, often for several hours, performing a range of mundane tasks for an incidental audience of passers-by. This paper positions the project as a departure point for wider consideration of some of the ways in which mundane acts of public labour, when approached as opportunities for queer performance, can become spaces for the expression of queer transgressive joy. The discussion critically reflects on three of the twelve labours: the communal repainting of a bus stop, the planting of a public garden and the laying of flowers in a derelict cemetery, as a means to consider how the public performance of mundane tasks by queer artists presents an intriguing opportunity for the performance of queer joy, and Black queer joy in particular, in contexts and spaces not typically associated with queerness and with queer bodies. The discussion also considers how the archiving of these labours, as a public exhibition of filmed documentation, constitutes an ‘archive of feelings’ (Cvetkovich 2003) that seeks to document experiences conjured through the performance of mundane labour, rather than merely archiving the act itself.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2023
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