Walking and Stumbling

Sara 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. As co-founder and Artistic Director of The Mothertongue Project women’s arts collective, Sara has experience in the field of theatre and performance as a performance-maker, performer, director and facilitator.

This seminar interrogates the efficacy of site-responsive performance and its contribution to embodied activism with The Mothertongue Project, a women’s arts collective based in South Africa. I locate embodied activism within the field of Somaesthetics. Somaesthetics, a term coined by Richard Shusterman is, “[c]oncerned with the critical study and meliorative cultivation of how we experience and use the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self fashioning” (Shusterman R.2008:1). The seminar specially examines, the production, Walk, a work created by The Mothertongue Project. Walk, was made by a company of performance-makers in response to Indian Artist Maya Krishna Rao’s The Walk. Rao made The Walk as a retort to the gang-rape and murder of 23-year-old Jyoti Pandey who was repeatedly raped and bludgeoned with an iron rod by six men on a bus in Delhi on December 2012.

This webinar is part of an open webinar series, hosted by CISC. To discover more please visit the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship and follow the Centre on Twitter.