Unrehearsed Futures: (Im)possible Futures

Unrehearsed Futures: (Im)possible Futures livestreamed on the global, commons-based peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv Thursday 17 June 2021 at 12 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4) / 5 p.m. BST (London, UTC +1) / 6 p.m. SAST (Cape Town, UTC +2) / 9:30 p.m. IST (Mumbai, UTC +5:30) / Friday 18 June at 2 a.m. AEST (Hobart, UTC +10).

In this discussion, we will use the GlobalGRACE project to think about the possibilities and value of engaging in social justice work through performance. We’re especially interested in discussing what lessons we can learn about the generative uses of performance from those whose everyday existence is always already negotiated from a place of precarity. We’ll also look at what proceeding from an ethics of care might mean and do for us in the context of the pandemic and other similar crises.

Speaker 1: Sara Matchett
Organization / School: Artistic Director and Co-Founder of the MotherTongue Theatre Project | Director of the CTDPS, UCT

Sara Matchett is the Director of the Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies (CTDPS) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She is also an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and the Regional Co-ordinator of the Fitzmaurice Institute for Africa. Her teaching profile centres around practical and academic courses that include, voice, acting, performance-making, applied theatre, and performance analysis. She is especially interested in transdisciplinary modes of creating. Her research explores the body as a site for generating images for the purpose of performance making and specifically focuses on investigating the relationship between breath and emotion, and breath and image, in an attempt to make performance that is inspired by a biography of the body. Her particular interests are in embodied practices that focus on presencing, co-sensing, co-llaborating and co-generating as a way of transforming egosystems to ecosystems. She is currently a co-investigator on the GlobalGrace Project South African work package, a partnership between the CTDPS, the African Gender Insitutue at UCT, and the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Task Force (SWEAT). As co-founder and Artistic Director of The Mothertongue Project women’s arts collective, Sara has experience in the field of theatre & performance nationally and internationally as a theatre-maker, performer, director and facilitator.

Speaker 2: Yaliwe Clarke
Organization / School: African Gender Institute, UCT

Yaliwe is the Interim Director of the African Gender Institute and a Lecturer in Gender Studies at the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Since 2000 she has interacted with a wide range of women's rights activists and peace-builders/conflict resolution practitioners in over 11 countries in Africa. She is currently a Phd candidate in Social Development at the University of Cape Town. Her Phd research investigates the micro-politics of women’s ‘peace activism’ in northern Uganda. She is also interested in notions of respectable femininity, marriage, pleasure, and (hetero)sexuality in Zambia.

Speaker 3: Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki
Organization / School: Early Career Researcher, UCT

Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki is a post-doctoral research fellow on the GlobalGRACE project housed at the Africa Gender Institute (AGI) and the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies (CTDPS) – University of Cape Town as well as the NGO – Sex Workers Advocacy and Educational Task Force (SWEAT). She is also a lecturer on the gender studies program at the AGI – University of Cape Town. She holds a doctorate in Gender Studies from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research interests are in critical race, gender, class, sexuality, creative activism, public health as well as decolonial thought and praxis.

Curator: Mbongeni N. Mtshali
Mbongeni N. Mtshali works across a range of performance disciplines, including dance and movement composition and performance, animation and puppetry, and site-specific performance installation among others. He earned a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, as well as the Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award and the Fleur du Cap Theatre Award for his achievements in directing and performance-making. Mtshali is primarily interested in black queer/femme performance in South Africa as well as Africa and its diaspora, turning towards queer genealogies of African decolonial world-making in the Caribbean, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. These research interests frame his practical and theoretical enquiries - with Unrehearsed Futures, as another venture into understanding the broader landscape of global theatre practice.