The ICA Podcast

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview African artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. Our sixth and final episode of this season features an interview with Mbongeni Mtshali, performance artist, director and head of the Centre for Theatre Dance and Performance Studies at UCT. In the conversation Mtshali goes into great detail about his performances Skin Tight and in(S)kin and details his artistic decisions behind the creation of these works. Mtshali also shares insights in his approach to language, through performance as well through teaching. He talks of languaging in the body, an embodied sense of space, time and subjectivity along with sharing his interests in kinetic and physical theatre Inspired by Denis Glover's poem The Magpies, Skin Tight tells the fraught, passionate and ultimately enchanting story of a New Zealand couple, Tom and Elizabeth and their lives together, a far jump from his earlier work, in(S)kin, a physical theatre work based on Mtshali’s life. This nimble and robust director expands on this shift in focus, from making rather gentle and revealing work out of one’s own subjective experience, to characters from another country, background and milieu. He also takes us through the provocative and physically demanding physicality in Skin Tight as the two characters share an extreme passion on stage and the means he used to arrive at this. Mtshali speaks about the thread of memory in both of these works; his abiding interest in and deep exploration of physical theatre, the political undertones of his work as well as his love for public art and performance. Season 4 of the ICA Podcast comprises interviews conducted by Nkgopoleng Moloi and produced by Atiyyah Khan. This is an initiative created by the Institute for Creative Arts which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you for listening

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview African artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. Our fifth episode features an interview with Aika Swai about her performance lecture titled Uncharted Dialog, which she presented at the ICA Scholars showcase last year. In presenting this work she speaks about her approach to what she calls ‘languaging’ in her work and the value of African languages as inherent knowledge. Uncharted Dialog was based on Swai’s dissertation which is centered around an imaginary conversation between American Indian and African language artists and includes speculation of what would happen if the two groups found ways of speaking to each other. In the performance Swai slowly revealed the absence of what may seem like an obvious and potentially powerful conversation, foregrounding the pervasive, deleterious and sometimes invisible traces of ongoing coloniality. In the podcast she talks through her construction of this. Swai’s research interests extend to themes of translatability, translanguaging and cultural transliteration in African and Caribbean literatures, the communicability of highly subjective experiences (such as the ones tied to race and gender), and the tension between ‘magic’ and ‘real’ when reading African, Caribbean or American First Nations literature through the lens of magical realism. Season 4 of the ICA Podcast comprises interviews conducted by Nkgopoleng Moloi and produced by Atiyyah Khan. This is an initiative created by the Institute for Creative Arts which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you for listening.

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. In our fourth episode of the season, artists Nelisiwe Xaba and Mocke Jansen Van Veuren speak about their work creating FAKE N.E.W.S, a multidisciplinary project integrating performance and digital art. The work explored misinformation, conspiracy theories and science denialism rampant on social media and traditional media platforms. The production pushed boundaries and provoked some heightened post performance conversations. The development of this iteration of the project was conducted through workshops with artists and students in Cape Town. In the podcast, the always ironic and pointed Xaba, talks through the creation of this work with collaborator van Veuren. Both consider processes of conceptualizing the work and most importantly and productively around working with students on a work that is not predetermined, but developed through the collective participation and subjective experiences of all participants. The two artists talk through the pains and rewards of the process as it involves young artists and students. Season 4 of the ICA Podcast comprises interviews conducted by Nkgopoleng Moloi and produced by Atiyyah Khan. This is an initiative created by the Institute for Creative Arts which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you for listening.

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. Our third episode features an interview with artist Bernard Akoi-Jackson who speaks about his site-specific work, DESTINATIONS - With Anthem for The Union (…and where, from birth, would they have berthed, should a dearth of destinations have prevailed?). During Ghana’s independence from Britain in 1957, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of the newly formed nation-state, declared that his country’s independence would mean nothing if it was not intrinsically linked with the struggle of all possible states within Africa that were yet to embark on their quests for freedom from colonial oppressors. Indeed, the winds of change blew throughout the continent and liberation became rife. Several bodies since have sought to keep these hopes alive and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) has through many failures and challenges, morphed into the African Union (AU), also bedevilled with a variety of challenges. In the performance DESTINATIONS … the public was encouraged to ponder on some of these concerns, whilst they moved slowly through the city, observing remnants and ruins of some of the past dreams of our mothers and fathers, with the hope that our futures would not become as bleak as our present. Navigating the nuances of this complex work in the podcast, Akoi-Jackson reflects on his theory of ‘disturbed methodologies’ - in one instance he created a whole new anthem with the help of the public, a wry critique of the African Union. This prolific and deeply engaging artist goes onto examine ritual, rites of passage and disruption through his method of performance. Season 4 of the ICA Podcast comprises interviews conducted by Nkgopoleng Moloi and produced by Atiyyah Khan. This is an initiative created by the Institute for Creative Arts which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you for listening.

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. Our second episode features an interview with internationally renowned artist Gabrielle Goliath provides rare and compelling insight into the research and creation of her monumental and acclaimed work Elegy, which had one of its first iterations at the ICA Live Art Festival in 2017 . Elegy is a long-term commemorative performance initiated by Goliath in 2015. Staged in various locations, each performance calls together a group of female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over the course of an hour. Responding to the physical, ontological and structural outworking(s) of rape-culture in South Africa, Elegy performances invoke the absent presence of individuals whose subjectivities have been fundamentally violated, and who are all too easily consigned to a generic, all-encompassing victimhood. Each performance commemorates a named, loved and missed woman or LGBTIQ+ individual subjected to fatal acts of gendered and sexualised violence. Significant to the work is how loss becomes a site for community, and for empathetic encounters with and across difference. Refusing the symbolic violence through which traumatised black, brown, femme and queer bodies are routinely objectified, Elegy performances open an alternative, relational space, wherein mourning is presented as a social and politically productive work, not in the sense of healing or closure but as a necessary and sustained irresolution. Season 4 of the ICA Podcast comprise interviews conducted by Nkgopoleng Moloi and produced by Atiyyah Khan. This is an initiative created by the Institute for Creative Arts which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you for listening.

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. Our first episode features multi-disciplinary artist Kenza Berrada about her work "Boujloud" (the man of skins) which was performed at the Live Art Network Africa Gathering at UCT’s Hiddingh Campus in February of 2023. Artist Kenza Berrada speaks about her work 'Boujloud' Man of Skins which was performed at the Live Art Network Africa Gathering at the ICA in 2023. Berrada discovered theatre at the age of ten. More than twenty years later, she covers her body with sheepskins in her first work as a playwright. Boujloud in Darija is a character who is half man, half beast. In Morocco, he gives his name to the festival celebrated the day after Aid el Kebir (the sacrifice of the sheep) in the Rif and Atlas regions . The work addresses the subject of abuse and incest, through the concrete questions that arise for those who decide to break the silence and speak out. Berrada questions; how do we make ourselves heard? Is there an appropriate time to share experiences of abuse, to be heard and listened to? Season 4 of the ICA Podcast comprise interviews conducted by Nkgopoleng Moloi and produced by Atiyyah Khan. This is an initiative created by the Institute for Creative Arts which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you for listening.

“And that title, Reclaiming the Poetics of Indigenous Horns was basically just trying to bring together this art form I so much adore with these instruments I also have so much respect and love for, and also using those two mediums to like, redefine and re-elevate what these instruments were, are and can still be.” Multi-instrumentalist and creative writer Kolawole Gbolahan reflects on his 2022 musical performance Reclaiming the Poetics of Indigenous Horns, which incorporates horns made from conch shells and the greater kudu, alongside contemporary musical instruments. Through poetry and storytelling, Gbolahan re-evaluates the capabilities of indigenous instruments in terms of both their use and social function, and seeks to trouble perceptions of indigenous instruments as archaic, naive and unsophisticated. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

“There's a school of thought that says indigenous knowledges need to be protected. And what that often means or implies is that it has to be concealed, and not shared in any way with anyone. And I'm not sure I completely agree with that. I see and I totally understand and appreciate the need to conceal. But [I] also understand that one of the ways of preservation is to increase access to those knowledges...” Artist and cultural producer Russel Hlongwane transports us to unexpected places in his speculative performance Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud, which draws on Zulu cosmology, folklore and systems of transcendence, and places them within a digital framework delivered through video, installation and a performance lecture. The work seamlessly merges myth, fact and fiction while proposing non-linearity and the displacement of hegemonic knowledge. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

“How I came about that title [ukuNqula kukuThandaza] was, I was really very much interested in the phenomenon of recitation and prayer, within an indigenous ecology of knowing, that really focuses on sound as a medium and a technology to activate energy of umoya, but to activate energy in whatever sense… Then it was centralising that activation of energy through the process of reciting and prayer.” Performer and multi-instrumentalist Nkosenathi Koela reflects on his transportive 2022 musical performance ukuNqula kukuThandaza, which meditates on practices of prayer through sound. Focusing on the vibrational power of words, chanting and incantation, Koela explores healing practices, indigenous music therapies and ritual making. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

​​"Ingoduko yamaNkazana, for me, became a conversation with myself and my ancestry. Because I wanted them to explain to me as to, when my body is brought home to its final resting place, whenever that day comes, how will the family and the friends and the rest of the world begin the conversation of speaking about this person's death? Who’s going to bathe my corpse? Are you going to remove certain things? Will you be ashamed of me leaving the ancestral realm with a flat chest and a penis between my legs, and then coming back with a vagina and a set of breasts? Will you be offended? Will you be upset? Will you be rejoiceful? Will it even matter?" We embark on an intimate journey with interdisciplinary artist Lukhanyiso Skosana through her haunting performance Ingoduko yamaNkazana (The Return of the Home of Harlots), a deeply personal work that sees the artist grappling with her identity and family histories. Death, grief, loss and ultimately recovery, rest and return are all the heart of this work, layered with memories of personal experiences, both traumatic and transformative. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

“We are everywhere is a performative explication of some of the theoretical concepts and how they found themselves as public interventions through last year. It was public interventions, not interventions in school. So it was important to be like, my practice is in the public and a public that goes beyond the institution. And it's also a practice of movement, like marching, that asks of the audience to move together from one place to another place.” We sit down with cultural worker Qondiswa James to talk through her provocative 2022 performance We are everywhere – comprising a public intervention in Cape Town’s Company’s Garden, a film, and a battle rap by James’s developing alter ego, the tragic clown – which interrogates invisibility through acts of witnessing, reflection and disruption. James invites us to consider socio-political functions of public art interventions and how these can be mobilised towards transgression. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

"At the time, when people were talking about the land issue in South Africa, yes, I was for it. But it's only when it hits you personally, that you’re like, okay, how do we then talk about this? And how do I resolve this in my own personal space?... So that's always been an issue. And this investigation in this performance was an investigation of land, at home in the Eastern Cape." In this second episode of Season 3, visual artist Asemahle Ntlonti takes us through her arresting 2022 performance Between my finger and thumb, which considers how histories are written, and speaks of digging up the past in order to retrieve what has been lost or forgotten. Ntlonti explores the weight of the pen, and the burden of remembering and recording, particularly in relation to land and dispossession. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

"I saw this thing that was growing literally on gravel; this flower that had popped on gravel. It was the most gorgeous thing… And I use that metaphor, or that image of that seed growing on rugged [land], arid sometimes, but specifically concrete, and I kept on thinking about that. And I'm like, well, isn't this what we're doing as queer people and femme people, women in this country? Isn't this what we’re doing every day, when we dare to live?" Join us as we journey with performance artist, activist and educator Tandile Mbatsha through their performance I AM, which premiered at the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Mbatsha invites us to reflect on queer histories and survival in a work permeated with deeply personal recollections, and captivating sounds and movement. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

Welcome to Season 3 of The ICA Podcast! In this Season – hosted by writer Nkgopoleng Moloi – each episode explores a performance featured at the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Join us over the next 7 episodes as each artist brings their performance to life, and reflects along the way on how their upbringing has shaped their practice. We'll be diving into: In this introductory episode, get a sneak peek at what lies ahead! The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

“The body remembers more than through the head. Nerve and vessel, artery and synapse, all carry information from point to point, suffusing muscle, bone and cell with a plethora of image and sound, a flicker of light, a scream or a touch. Sometimes we wish that a delete button might annihilate some of this information. But the body instead stores relentlessly, file upon file, bottomless cabinets of memory, individual and collective…” In this final episode of Season 2 of The ICA Podcast, academic, curator, choreographer and director of the ICA, Jay Pather, draws us into his visceral and haunting 2008 work, Body of Evidence – the intricate workshop process from which it emerged, and the work’s grappling with precarity, memory, the inexpressibility of pain, and the long aftereffects of trauma lodged in the body – for the individual and for the nation. This marks the end of Season 2, but Season 3 is just days away! Join the ICA for the public launch of Season 3 at 18.00 on Friday 7 October 2022 in Cape Town! BOOK YOUR FREE TICKETS TO THE S3 LAUNCH EVENT HERE: www.qkt.io/ICAPodcastS3Launch Music and sounds in this episode are from Jay Pather’s Body of Evidence performed at the Durban Playhouse in 2009 by Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, and sound designed by James Webb. Books referenced in this episode are: Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa by Ketu H. Katrak; and Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice by Catherine M. Cole. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“When my grandmother died, I thought about all the stories that she took with her in the ground, and I thought a lot about how, in Romania, you have so many people having such interesting memories and interesting pasts that are not archived… And I started to record things because I talk a lot with people – I think that's what makes me happiest, you know, to encounter people and learn from them and exchange things.” Romanian interdisciplinary artist nomi blum invites us into the experimental performance space, and rich written and aural archive of Fragments of Encounters – an immersive installation, first performed at the Infecting the City public art festival in 2019, that emerged out of blum’s everyday encounters and conversations with people of different ages, backgrounds, nationalities and languages. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“Post 1994, it felt like you were being made part of a body national, and there was something slightly and softly violent about it... Utopia, balloons, zebras, multi colours – all of those things, for me, were used to be a very dark critique of the utopia that we thought we built in South Africa for ourselves. The one that we burn people for.” Performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga takes us on an immersive journey through the sights, sounds and movement of his epic retrospective work, Things We Lost in the Rainbow. Performed at the 2018 ICA Live Art Festival curated by Jay Pather, Things We Lost in the Rainbow unfolded as a two-hour long multi-sited, multi-media procession in which a cast of over 30 avatars led the audience through Cape Town’s city centre, from the digital dome of the Planetarium to the walls of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God on Buitenkant Street. Music by Blue Dot Sessions, and additional sounds and music are from Athi-Patra Ruga's video works Over the Rainbow and Public Service Announcement. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“I just knew that I wanted the audience to be the catalyst, or driver, of the action. I don't know if it's from a particular type of training in theatre, but there's always so much pressure to do, and to fill the space with actions and sounds and whatever. And we find the audience doing the complete opposite. They're just like, sitting there quite still and quietly. And I knew I wanted to kind of flip that around.” Winner of the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art, Gavin Krastin, invites us into the intimate Bindery theatre to re-experience his visceral and spectacular 2018 participatory performance Yet to be Determined – a haunting meditation on vulnerability, connection, pain, personhood and transformation. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“In the beginning, I began to think: ‘Okay, how can I save the world?' Now, I'm more like: ‘What kind of world do I want to live in?’ And how can my expressions become a language that begins these worlds. As a proposition of another kind – I think what Fred Moten calls ‘another kind of presencing’; another way of presencing yourself. I'm proposing a way of presencing oneself.” Join us as we journey with choreographer and academic Nomcebisi Moyikwa through the research, creation and performance of her 2017 work Qash Qash. Comprised of a series of visually and aurally arresting portraits of black subjectivity, Qash Qash is both an exploration of, and an insistence on, everyday moments of aliveness; lineage and continuity; sexual pleasure; interruptions; and community. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“Associating Jesus with whiteness, associating Jesus with the upper class, the way that this person gets utilised sociopolitically – it's completely antithetical to everything that he was, and everything that he ministered. And so, I guess, I just needed to re-script that, and the way that I could re-script that was by projecting or taking my biography and putting it into the life of Jesus.” Performance artist, writer and cultural worker Kopano Maroga guides us through the reverberant soundscape and rich imagery of their 2019 performance, Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations, and considers how their spiritual background, study of comparative mythology, and reading of Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” shaped and inspired the making of the work. The ICA Podcast is creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.