EXHIBITIONS
Digital exhibition sites are an opportunity for our ReTAGS' colleagues to showcase their research in ways that are accessible and visually engaging while still maintaining scholarly and archival rigour.
Protest, P/performance, and Tragic Aftermath | Dr Carla Lever
Both post-colonial and post-Apartheid, contemporary South Africa is often constructed solely in terms of its past. Despite this, the structural legacies of these extractive and oppressive systems remain urgently, painfully present tense. Few scripts exist for states of/in aftermath of tragedy, whether formally, on stage, or in everyday life. Indeed, tragic aftermath is often represented in classical drama as a circular, lost, unmoored and unresolved state of being. Post-catastrophe, how do people re-form their national or personal narrative? Dr Carla Lever has constructed an exhibition site to guide audiences through both the research that informed her forthcoming monograph, and the methodology of 'serious play' underpinning her pedagogy.
Dream Book | Mandla Mbothwe
Embracing the moments of served interruptions by pandemics, our journeys are summoned to other beings of those who existed, directed to other detours of tragedies and into the dreams of digital hybrids. It is these moments that we are remembered by fragmented wounds of mixed tenses and multiplicity of our amathongo (ancestral dreams) that we subconsciously retrace and remap imizila (routes/roots traces) of tragedies of our lives and dramas of realities in harvesting old and new rituals of healing stories in visual metaphors, sonic idioms and invisible codes. This exhibition site is an attempt of hybridising the live into other old and new forms of mythopoesis.
Women of Trachis | CTDPS Students 2023
This project with fourth-year students from the Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies (CTDPS), forms part of a course on Theatre & Dance Research. The project has aimed to shift thinking about methodology for performance research from the technologies of writing to the technologies of performance and its digital archiving. The project was offered by The Reimagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South project (ReTAGS) and was led by Mark Fleishman, Mandla Mbothwe and Mwenya Kabwe with assistance from ReTAGS digital archivist, Jayne Batzofin.
