Date: 27 July 2023, 13.00 Johannesburg time (GMT +2), over Zoom
Duration: 90min
Guest Artist: Smangaliso Ngwenya (South Africa)
Cost: Free
Access: The working language will be English. Live captioning will be used.
Registration: Sign up here: https://shorturl.at/gmpK1
In connection with the Performance Studies International’s annual conference, the Future Advisory Board (FAB), PSi Lexicon, and multi-disciplinary artist Smangaliso Ngwenya invite participants to gather and move together for a 90-minute online workshop as we map our research journeys in and through the body.
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
Multi-disciplinary artist Smangaliso Ngwenya leads a 90-minute embodied practice exploring the relationship between African dance and conceptual, ancestral, and whole-body rootedness. The session is open to any skill level and performing background and will introduce African dance techniques across a range of styles, whilst welcoming the ways in which these converge in our own practices. It is particularly appropriate for postgraduates, early career researchers, artists, and arts workers.
The workshop is being presented in dialogue with this year’s PSi conference theme of ‘uhambo’ and ‘uhambo oluzilawuyalo’, and reflects the FAB’s collaborative focus of ‘roots and routes’ that looks to identify source points, lineages, branches, and connections between our community’s collective practices. It is being delivered in partnership with PSi Lexicon, a living project that reflects on the changing discourses, grammars, embodied practices, epistemologies and creative traces of performance studies. Departing from embodied wandering as a set of methods for unravelling performance studies, these workshops offer spaces to embrace and question our rootedness and the creative negotiations, tensions and entanglements of definitions. Here we trace the ideas and concepts as they travel between or appear in places, times, languages, people and communities and the materials that emerge from the workshops will go into the Lexicon as a series of entries.
JOURNEYING TOWARDS THE BRINK OF THE ALL BEING —WORKSHOP DETAILS
This embodied experience is grounded in one’s roots—as deep as the ancestral roots and as immediate as your identity, being and existence. This African dance-inspired experience facilitates an engulfment in the ecstasy of dance to journey and discover routes nearer and nearer to the centre of “all being” (Primus, 1996, p. 4). Exploring the theme of roots through routes, the workshop facilitates an experience using contemporary African dance techniques such as Afrofusion, Vincent Mantsoe’s Koba Technique and a choreographic moment towards implementing the ecosomatic paradigm.
The session opens with a grounding activity, reflecting on what “roots and routes” means to participants as a collective, mapping where our own research pathways and collective journeys intersect.
In the second half, we will, together, sensing from the inside out, journey through an embodied language and vocabulary from excavations and discoveries located in our roots in and beyond our physical body. The workshop will travel through each participant’s routes (intellectual, emotional, physical, social, aesthetic, creative and spiritual) towards the brink of a whole being.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE – https://shorturl.at/gmpK1
The session is being supported by PSi and is free to attend. It is open to any skill level or background in movement, dance and performance. You do not need to be proficient in dance to participate. All you need is a curiosity to explore roots and routes together. However, places are limited, book here to secure your spot.
We hope to see you there.
FAB and PSi Lexicon—
Alex, Anette, Gladhys, Joey, Nien and Diana.
Smangaliso Ngwenya—ABOUT
Smangaliso Ngwenya is a multi-disciplinary artist (dancer, performer, writer, director, choreographer, researcher, and videographer) and founder of Isifiso SakaGogo Performance Theatre. The essence of all his offerings, research and writing is rooted in dance and movement, initiated and rooted in the embodied, moving, dancing black body towards investigating epistemologies and pedagogies rooted in the black African experience embedded in Afrocentricty. He acquired his first traces of dance and movement training from First Physical Theatre Dance Company while completing his Bachelor of Journalism and Media Studies (specialising in TV journalism) at Rhodes University (2013-2016). After completing his studies in 2016, he overtly prioritised physical and practical investigations of movement, dance and choreography with the internationally acclaimed Vuyani Dance Theatre (2017-2019). Thus far, Smangaliso has choreographed works investigating different explorations of identity, heritage, African dance and the embodied processes of creating and embodying dance and movement and the influences thereof. He has choreographed eight works: “Mask-your-linearity” (2017), “Dictated Democracy” (2018), Standard Bank Ovation award-winning screendance “Fragmented Scribbles” (2020), “Glare” (2020), “Home?’” (2020), Descent (2021) by Jake Natane and Evelyn (2023). To better understand the creative and cultural industries, he embarked on and completed a Master of Arts in the field of Cultural Policy and Management at the University of Witwatersrand in 2020. Recently, he has had the privilege of being a performance ethnographer and performer in “Barena… Reimagined” (2022) by David April, choreographed from Vincent Mantsoe’s ”Barena” (1998). It is in this experience and previous experiences of David April and Vincent Mantsoe (2017-current) that the impetus to locate and document African epistemologies of African dance was solidified for his current PhD research – especially noting Mantsoe’s “Koba” technique and April’s pedagogies and approaches to neo traditional African Dance.
The PSi Lexicon—ABOUT
The PSi Lexicon is a living project that reflects on the changing discourses, grammars, embodied practices, epistemologies and creative traces of performance studies. The Lexicon moves along with ideas and concepts as they travel between or emerge in places, times, languages, people and communities. It is a live place for the convergence of the multiple roots and routes of performance studies.The Lexicon is home to a number of multilingual entries, which can take any creative form.
The Future Advisory Board—ABOUT
The Future Advisory Board (FAB) is a collective body of international emerging and early-career performance studies scholars, artists, and artist-scholars. We bring together perspectives, strategies, tactics, provocations, ideas, visions, hopes, and dreams from our various practices of theory and performance. Officially launched in July 2016 at PSi#22 Melbourne as a new PSi initiative, the FAB aims to connect graduate students and early-career scholars and artists worldwide, and to increase the visibility of diversity within Performance Studies.
You can find us on our website or on Twitter.
Photo: Christo Doherty
Diana Damian Martin