As people in the performing and creative arts, how do we deal with the idea of an unrehearsed ability of the future (as the pandemic revealed) and the rigours and strictures of absolutely essential regimentation, in order to ensure health?
Exploring this and more, in our fifth conversation at Unrehearsed Futures (Season 3), we dove into what it means to live on the precipice on catastrophe, a chaosmos, with Jay Pather, the director of the Institute for Creative Art (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. To explain how this reflects in his own work with the Live Art Festival and the Infecting the City Public Art Festival, Pather talked about his early influences in approaching appropriation as a means for resistance.
He shared, “In Body of Evidence, I worked with Gray’s Anatomy, these colonial inscriptions of what the body might look and feel like. I wrote that ‘the body as it remembers, more than through the head’. So, I used these cross sections of the body as a means of getting to what was not necessarily the chaos. but the streaming of an effect, of thought, of presenting inside of the body.”
STAY TUNED! We will be publishing a long-form article about the talk and the ideas/themes that emerged during the session on our blog in the coming weeks.
Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao
Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:
