Browsing by Author "Olsen, Kathryn Rita."

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Choreographies of identity, self and the ‘African’ dancing body in negotiating contemporary dancing histories and practices in KwaZulu-Natal post 1994 : a case study of Flatfoot Dance Company.
(2018) Loots, Lliane Jennifer.; Olsen, Kathryn Rita.
This thesis, through a series of case studies of my dance work with FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY (post 1994), offers an interrogation of both my internal and external processes of decolonising entrenched paradigms of training, writing/researching and making dance and attempting to re-imagine an inclusive dance practice in South Africa. I use the conceptual framework of ‘decolonisation’, in part, because it is the key political and pedagogical terminology being used in South African within current student protest movements such as ‘#Fees Must Fall’ and within the 2016 (onwards) South African debates around recurriculation of higher learning institutions. I further, use the frame of decolonising as it offers me personally, pedagogically and politically an opportunity to look deeply at what this might mean in action and in practice for my own dance teaching and dance making in South Africa – post 1994. This is an autoethnographic study of a 24-year temporal space in my own engagement with dance and is set against the larger geo-political, social and cultural fights of South Africa. The personal narratives offer a microcosm of larger issues and focus a lens on how arts (and dance in particular) have been, are, and become, a tipping point in the enactment of lived – and significantly – embodied democracy (a term I go on to explain) in South Africa. Section One of this thesis is an investigation – through my community-based dance education work with FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY – into a proposed methodology and praxis for a decolonised pedagogy. Section Two turns away from an explicit discussion around pedagogy and moves to an examination of my choreographic practices with FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY post 1994. In Section Two, I reflect on my own on-going work as a professional choreographer and attempt to bring together my own multiple identities as researcher, teacher and choreographer as I begin to interrogate, through this academic text and the writing and reflective process, my own artistic process as a dance maker, dance educator, and a choreographer in South Africa. I do not isolate methodology in a chapter of its own in this thesis. Given the feminist and autoethnogaphic nature of this study, I have opted instead to allow the methodology to inform and be articulated in each chapter as it reveals process and practice.This thesis is also made up significantly, though not exclusively, of collecting together, re-considering, re-writing and re-focusing a selection of my previously published articles that have spanned 23 years as an academic scholar interrogating my research within the paradigm of Praxis Led Research. This act of re-visiting dance practice, writing and pedagogy is also part of the autoethnographic nature of interrogating and re-interrogating identities of self and of the ‘African’ dancing body. This is all effected in a negotiation of contemporary dancing histories and practices in KwaZulu-Natal post 1994 through my case study of FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY.
The exploration of the dynamics of the South African Indie music scene through an auto- ethnographic account of the making and marketing of my debut album, Becoming.
(2022) Mapisa, Tsholofelo Relebogile.; Olsen, Kathryn Rita.
This study of the independent music scene in South Africa is motivated by my own experiences of composing, recording, and independently marketing my debut album, Becoming. While my journey to becoming a musician required a long-term commitment to the development of musical skills, I found that once I had reached the point of recording my first album, I was poorly versed in marketing skills and knowledge of how to engage effectively with the Indie music scene in South Africa. This study is thus inspired by my own experience (hence the autoethnographic methodology) and the need to understand this particular social network, mechanism, and way of being in the world that is called the South African Indie music scene. The methodologies used for this research include: Autoethnography, Ethnography, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis otherwise known as IPA, which I used when working with four musicians and music business practitioners who exert some influence in independent music in South Africa and who have achieved a measure of success. Their journeys provide a context for my own experiences and foreground the issues that independent artists may confront. The aim of this research is not to find fixed answers to the dilemmas that remain prevalent in the South African Indie music market, but rather, to dissect, discuss, and explore what may happen when pursuing an independent music career. Through this research, I discovered that many of the tensions between art and commerce pertain to how we think and dichotomise the two. My findings therefore propose a merging of the two – what I present as ‘entrepreneurial artists’ in Chapter Four, to alleviate some of the tensions one may face. Through a detailed analysis of my own choices, the choices of my case studies, and the consequences of these choices, I have sought to clarify the operation of this particular aspect of the South African Music industry.
The harmonic perspective of rhythm: applications for the expansion of musical awareness and the acquisition of rhythmically complex music.
(2017) Drace, John Miles.; Olsen, Kathryn Rita.
This study describes and evaluates a new paradigm for informed rhythmic practice: the harmonic perspective of rhythm. Normal, theoretically driven or written rhythmic conceptions have tended to rely on a limited grid based on one predominate metric cycle that is expanded by binary division into twos, fours, eights and so on, or by ternary division into threes, sixes, twelves, etc. The harmonic perspective, however, posits that, for much of the world's music, a broader, multidimensional grid is in use. Such a conception allows not only for a wider palette, drawing on metric structures of one through nine and beyond, but also for the simultaneous use of several of those structures, thus rendering those musics in question rhythmically multidimensional. This multidimensionality seems to operate on the level of feel—where two subdivisional references exhibit a unique pull from which different styles and/or performers find their own subtle, non-isochronous balance; on the level of basic compositional structure—where two or more metric structures co-exist in relative balance to create the background of the piece; and on the level of melody and improvisation, where performers draw on more than the usually considered, compositionally prescribed, metric structures for their expression. The viability of this perspective is established using examples from the African Diaspora. Practical exercises as prescribed by Puerto Rican percussionist and theorist Efrain Toro are presented, discussed and evaluated, and the applicability of the perspective to the learning of Indian rhythm is considered. The research is conducted as a subject-centred ethnography, combined with a self-reflexive/auto-ethnographic approach, where the researcher applies his own experience, observations, and insight to questions raised by the study. Foundational discussions of constructed versus experiential knowledge, the author's background, and Indian rhythmic systems precede and accompany the primary discussion.
Local music and identity: a study of the signifiers of South African identity embedded in the South African Music Awards’ ‘Record of the Year’ listings from 2013 to 2018.
(2020) De Vries, Lee-Ann Delarise.; Olsen, Kathryn Rita.
This research paper explores the concept of a local identity through the gaze of a postapartheid South Africa. In discussing ‘local’, this study explores pertinent discourse surrounding what could be deemed as the South African experience. This study makes use of a Grounded Theory methodological approach. This particular methodology was used in order to ensure that all findings within the context of this study are strongly based on observations, i.e. the data, and not pre-established hypotheses. This process consequently necessitates the contextualisation of quantitative information because it is by means of this that we allow numerical data to reflect lived experience. In doing so, it allows for a re-contextualisation of the ‘local’ ideology in the context of the South African music industry. This is achieved through an analysis of the South African Music Awards’ Record of the Year category as an historical cache of the music of the time period in question. Through an understanding of the heterogeneous and intersectional nature of local identity(s), this study makes reference to a number of broad identities which have been pinpointed as being useful signifiers for our understanding of the post-apartheid South African society. This dissertation is rooted in the belief that local identity is grounded in a capitalistic society which is inherently built on principles of historic imposition, racialism and patriarchy. It is argued that the historic imposition present in contemporary South Africa contributes substantially to what it means to be a South African, and is inherent in the way we think or see ourselves. This represents what could be seen as a revision Stuart Hall’s ‘circuit of culture’ (1997).
Politics, production and process : discourses on tradition in contemporary maskanda.
(2000) Olsen, Kathryn Rita.; Impey, Angela.
No abstract available.
Raiding genres, remaking contemporary South African jazz discourse: the study of choices and ideals behind my compositional portfolio.
(2019) Giandhari, Riley Joseph.; Gonsalves, Neil Joseph.; Olsen, Kathryn Rita.
This thesis is presented as an autoethnography that documents the process of composing a portfolio of works that are identifiable as Jazz. Autoethnography is understood here as both a theory and a method. While my personal perspective is central, the social milieu in which I am positioned is also important as I understand composition as a process that is dependent on, and motivated by, context. In this way, composition is seen as closely tied to identity. The pieces fall into three ensemble categories: those composed with particular musicians in mind, those composed for specific instrumental combination; and those composed for a big band format. In the first category, my focus as a composer is to write music with a particular set of musicians in mind. In the second category, I compose and arrange for instrumentation. In the third category, my focus is writing for a big band, in which I create a simulation; I use recording software to programme the instruments. The intention is to interrogate and analyse how and why I made the compositional decisions, and to expose my perceptions of how the process of composition unfolded. Underlying my compositional strategies is the idea that as a fundamentally improvisational idiom, jazz can accommodate musical characteristics and techniques associated with other established genres like Rock, Goema, Gqom, Latin, and Afro-Cuban music. The motivation for my approach to composition is to bring the jazz idiom closer to the diverse musical environment which I experience in Durban.