Repeating and disrupting embodied histories through performance: Exhibit A Mies Julie and Itsoseng
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Date
2013
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Abstract
The concern about South African arts being - as Achille Mbembe claims - �stuck in repetition�
can be challenged by examining developments in the performance arts which deliberately
employ repetition. In these cases repetition is played with not just as a process of voiding or
emptying out, but also to reconceptualise and embody historical and lived experiences. This
can involve re-enactments of images, texts and theatrical styles which are worked upon and
productively problematised through performance as a live event. In looking at the performance
aesthetics of repetition, Diana Taylor�s The archive and the repertoire (2003) provides a useful
context, since Taylor�s work straddles the disciplinary intersections between performance
studies, anthropology and history. As point of departure, this article focuses on three works
produced at the 2012 National Arts Festival, since the accumulation of new and not-new
works viewed in quick succession offers scope for identifying aesthetic trends and shifts.
Brett Bailey�s Exhibit A, Yael Farber's Mies Julie, and Omphile Molusi's Itsoseng, for instance,
demonstrate various aspects of an aesthetics of repetition. The embodied histories that are
performed in these works throw up a number of paradoxes. However, the productions do not
simply circulate performing bodies as empty aesthetic images, but as transmitters of cultural
memory, as well as witnesses to states of profound transition that engage both performers
and audiences alike.
Description
Keywords
Embodiment, National Arts Festival, Performance art, Re-enactment, Repetition, South African cultural production, Theatre aesthetics
Citation
Flockemann, M. (2013). Repeating and disrupting embodied histories through performance: Exhibit A, Mies Julie and Itsoseng. Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, 27(4): 403-417