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How do Live Artists see, think, listen, respond and create? The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town dives into this question via long-form interviews with South African artists and curators who perform or curate Live Art. Join us on site and in studio as we explore ground-breaking performances, public interventions and participatory installations – and the fascinating minds that bring them into being.
Episodes
Thursday Nov 03, 2022
Thursday Nov 03, 2022
“We are everywhere is a performative explication of some of the theoretical concepts and how they found themselves as public interventions through last year. It was public interventions, not interventions in school. So it was important to be like, my practice is in the public and a public that goes beyond the institution. And it's also a practice of movement, like marching, that asks of the audience to move together from one place to another place.”
We sit down with cultural worker Qondiswa James to talk through her provocative 2022 performance We are everywhere – comprising a public intervention in Cape Town’s Company’s Garden, a film, and a battle rap by James’s developing alter ego, the tragic clown – which interrogates invisibility through acts of witnessing, reflection and disruption. James invites us to consider socio-political functions of public art interventions and how these can be mobilised towards transgression.
The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.
Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.
Thursday Oct 27, 2022
Thursday Oct 27, 2022
"At the time, when people were talking about the land issue in South Africa, yes, I was for it. But it's only when it hits you personally, that you’re like, okay, how do we then talk about this? And how do I resolve this in my own personal space?... So that's always been an issue. And this investigation in this performance was an investigation of land, at home in the Eastern Cape."
In this second episode of Season 3, visual artist Asemahle Ntlonti takes us through her arresting 2022 performance Between my finger and thumb, which considers how histories are written, and speaks of digging up the past in order to retrieve what has been lost or forgotten. Ntlonti explores the weight of the pen, and the burden of remembering and recording, particularly in relation to land and dispossession.
The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.
Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.
Thursday Oct 20, 2022
Thursday Oct 20, 2022
"I saw this thing that was growing literally on gravel; this flower that had popped on gravel. It was the most gorgeous thing… And I use that metaphor, or that image of that seed growing on rugged [land], arid sometimes, but specifically concrete, and I kept on thinking about that. And I'm like, well, isn't this what we're doing as queer people and femme people, women in this country? Isn't this what we’re doing every day, when we dare to live?"
Join us as we journey with performance artist, activist and educator Tandile Mbatsha through their performance I AM, which premiered at the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Mbatsha invites us to reflect on queer histories and survival in a work permeated with deeply personal recollections, and captivating sounds and movement.
The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.
Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.
Thursday Oct 13, 2022
Thursday Oct 13, 2022
Welcome to Season 3 of The ICA Podcast!
In this Season – hosted by writer Nkgopoleng Moloi – each episode explores a performance featured at the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Join us over the next 7 episodes as each artist brings their performance to life, and reflects along the way on how their upbringing has shaped their practice. We'll be diving into:
- I AM by Tandile Mbatsha;
- Between my finger and thumb by Asemahle Ntlonti;
- We are everywhere by Qondiswa James;
- Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud by Russel Hlongwane;
- Ingoduko yamaNkazana (The Return of the Home of Harlots) by Lukhanyiso Skosana;
- UkuNqula kukuThandaza by Nkosenathi Koela; and
- Reclaiming the Poetics of Indigenous Horns by Kolawole Gbolahan.
In this introductory episode, get a sneak peek at what lies ahead!
The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.
Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.
Saturday Oct 01, 2022
Saturday Oct 01, 2022
“The body remembers more than through the head. Nerve and vessel, artery and synapse, all carry information from point to point, suffusing muscle, bone and cell with a plethora of image and sound, a flicker of light, a scream or a touch. Sometimes we wish that a delete button might annihilate some of this information. But the body instead stores relentlessly, file upon file, bottomless cabinets of memory, individual and collective…”
In this final episode of Season 2 of The ICA Podcast, academic, curator, choreographer and director of the ICA, Jay Pather, draws us into his visceral and haunting 2008 work, Body of Evidence – the intricate workshop process from which it emerged, and the work’s grappling with precarity, memory, the inexpressibility of pain, and the long aftereffects of trauma lodged in the body – for the individual and for the nation.
This marks the end of Season 2, but Season 3 is just days away! Join the ICA for the public launch of Season 3 at 18.00 on Friday 7 October 2022 in Cape Town! BOOK YOUR FREE TICKETS TO THE S3 LAUNCH EVENT HERE: www.qkt.io/ICAPodcastS3Launch
Music and sounds in this episode are from Jay Pather’s Body of Evidence performed at the Durban Playhouse in 2009 by Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, and sound designed by James Webb.
Books referenced in this episode are: Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa by Ketu H. Katrak; and Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice by Catherine M. Cole.
The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.
Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.
Tuesday Jun 14, 2022
Tuesday Jun 14, 2022
“When my grandmother died, I thought about all the stories that she took with her in the ground, and I thought a lot about how, in Romania, you have so many people having such interesting memories and interesting pasts that are not archived… And I started to record things because I talk a lot with people – I think that's what makes me happiest, you know, to encounter people and learn from them and exchange things.”
Romanian interdisciplinary artist nomi blum invites us into the experimental performance space, and rich written and aural archive of Fragments of Encounters – an immersive installation, first performed at the Infecting the City public art festival in 2019, that emerged out of blum’s everyday encounters and conversations with people of different ages, backgrounds, nationalities and languages.
The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.
Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.
Friday May 06, 2022
Friday May 06, 2022
“Post 1994, it felt like you were being made part of a body national, and there was something slightly and softly violent about it... Utopia, balloons, zebras, multi colours – all of those things, for me, were used to be a very dark critique of the utopia that we thought we built in South Africa for ourselves. The one that we burn people for.”
Performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga takes us on an immersive journey through the sights, sounds and movement of his epic retrospective work, Things We Lost in the Rainbow. Performed at the 2018 ICA Live Art Festival curated by Jay Pather, Things We Lost in the Rainbow unfolded as a two-hour long multi-sited, multi-media procession in which a cast of over 30 avatars led the audience through Cape Town’s city centre, from the digital dome of the Planetarium to the walls of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God on Buitenkant Street.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, and additional sounds and music are from Athi-Patra Ruga's video works Over the Rainbow and Public Service Announcement.
The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.
Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.
Tuesday Feb 22, 2022
Tuesday Feb 22, 2022
“I just knew that I wanted the audience to be the catalyst, or driver, of the action. I don't know if it's from a particular type of training in theatre, but there's always so much pressure to do, and to fill the space with actions and sounds and whatever. And we find the audience doing the complete opposite. They're just like, sitting there quite still and quietly. And I knew I wanted to kind of flip that around.”
Winner of the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art, Gavin Krastin, invites us into the intimate Bindery theatre to re-experience his visceral and spectacular 2018 participatory performance Yet to be Determined – a haunting meditation on vulnerability, connection, pain, personhood and transformation.
The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.
Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.
Tuesday Feb 01, 2022
Tuesday Feb 01, 2022
“In the beginning, I began to think: ‘Okay, how can I save the world?' Now, I'm more like: ‘What kind of world do I want to live in?’ And how can my expressions become a language that begins these worlds. As a proposition of another kind – I think what Fred Moten calls ‘another kind of presencing’; another way of presencing yourself. I'm proposing a way of presencing oneself.”
Join us as we journey with choreographer and academic Nomcebisi Moyikwa through the research, creation and performance of her 2017 work Qash Qash. Comprised of a series of visually and aurally arresting portraits of black subjectivity, Qash Qash is both an exploration of, and an insistence on, everyday moments of aliveness; lineage and continuity; sexual pleasure; interruptions; and community.
The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.
Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.
Wednesday Dec 22, 2021
Wednesday Dec 22, 2021
“Associating Jesus with whiteness, associating Jesus with the upper class, the way that this person gets utilised sociopolitically – it's completely antithetical to everything that he was, and everything that he ministered. And so, I guess, I just needed to re-script that, and the way that I could re-script that was by projecting or taking my biography and putting it into the life of Jesus.”
Performance artist, writer and cultural worker Kopano Maroga guides us through the reverberant soundscape and rich imagery of their 2019 performance, Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations, and considers how their spiritual background, study of comparative mythology, and reading of Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” shaped and inspired the making of the work.
The ICA Podcast is creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.
Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.