Defining our own terrain: interrogating the/my black female body as a site of possibilities in contemporary South African performance and my own screen dance making (2021/2022).
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Date
2023
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Abstract
This dissertation explores Black female performing bodies as knowledge makers
particularly in the South African context. It explores the notion that Black female
performing bodies are sites of meaning making and storytelling within performance
practice (Nqelenga, n.d.). This research is an act of reconceptualising and a
(re)learning of Black female bodies, as sites of knowing both historically and for me
personally, within my own situated lived experience and dance performance practices.
I consider Black female bodies as possible sites of resistance, knowledge, power,
spirituality, resilience and empowerment. In this dissertation, the key intentions are to
critically examine the extent to which Black South African female bodies are an
embodiment of resilience, sites of possibilities and possible tools of/for artistic
expression in/through performance practice. I do this, firstly, with a special focus on
interrogating the examples of performative works of South African Buhlebezwe Siwani,
uNgenzelaphantsi (2014); Lhola Amira’s (also known as Khanyisile Mbongwa)
work/conversational discourse in the form of a pre-recorded interview on YouTube
titled LHOLA Amira – here’s what you need to know about the artist who calls herself
an ancestral presence (2018); Mamela Nyamza Grounded (2022)1 and De-Apart-Hate
(2017)2. Alongside the work of Nelisiwe, Xaba, They Look At Me, And That’s All They
Think (2006). Secondly, I navigate my own performance/dance practice in setting up
a screen dances solo project that offers an embodied response to the theorising of this
dissertation. This small solo film project (which is available to be viewed via YouTube)
is part of the dissertation and is a practice as research (Fraylin, 1994; Sullivan, 2005;
Fleishman, 2012) inclusion into finding alternate ways of speaking into the
engagements of this dissertation.
This dissertation argues that the presence and appearance of Black female South
African bodies stand not only as contested political sites but also as sites of potential
resistance. I argue that Black women’s bodies have the potential to articulate
narratives, discourses, and inscriptions written on it, in what Madison calls “theories of
the flesh” (1993, p. 213) which I will interrogate more fully in Chapter Two of this
dissertation and embed into my analysis of case studies and my own screen dance in
Chapter Three and Four. I seek to interrogate alternative narratives and meaning-making processes in order to foreground the potentials of Black female embodiment
in the South African context by using an autoenthographic approach alongside
practice-based research. This dissertation contributes to the small but growing field of
study around the agency of Black female bodies in performance (for example, Carole
Boyce-Davies 1994; Pumla Qgola 2001; Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, 2002;
Buhlebezwe Siwani 2016; Pumelela Nqelenga (n.d.).
Description
Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.