Description
Book SynopsisConsiders South African choreographer Jay Pather's progressive performance art in global context.
Trade ReviewKatrak's text offers the first sustained scholarly account of the disruptive subversion, generative promise, and persistently evolving performance manifestoes of one of South Africa's most prominent and prolific arts practitioners and thinkers.
-- Juanita Finestone-Praeg * Journal of the African Literature Association *
This is a rich, complex book that tackles and criss-crosses race, space, social and gender divides across historic periods, continents, local and global contexts. This is what makes it amazing and also challenging to read. It is theoretically rich and at times challenging to hold the many different theorists, reviewers' views, and different paradigms being invoked at once.
-- Yvett Hutchison * South African Theatre Journal *
With its historical, cultural, and spatial contextualization of an artist whose work has cross many gendered and racial boundaries, Katrak's Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa is a benchmark for future scholarship on South African dance and performance.
* Praxis *
Table of ContentsPreface: Personal Journey to Discovering Jay Pather
Introduction: Pather's Spatial Politics within South Africa's Historical and Political Landscape
Journeys across Political, Socio-racial and Geographic Borderlines: Interconnecting the Present, Past, and Future
1. Crossing (over): Indian Ocean Migrations Pather's Historical Dance-Dramas
2. Race and Space Matter: Outdancing Apartheid's Grip (1980s and 1990s) The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Choreographed Critiques of Broken Promises Post-1994 Testimonies; Laws of Recall; Unclenching the Fist, Forked Tongues, Shifting Spaces, Tilting Time
The Transitional and the In-between: Theoretical and Creative Engagements with Urban Geography (2000-2015)
3. Site-Specific Cartographies of Belonging Cityscapes; Republic; Rite, Blind Spot
4. Site-Responsive Works of History and Memory Home; The Beautiful Ones Must be Born; Body of Evidence; Qaphela Caesar
Curatorial Choreographies: Challenges of Curating Public Art Festivals (2007–Present)
5. A New Kind of Performance-Curation of Live Artists Director of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (2010-2015), now the Institute for Creative Arts (2016 on) Spier Contemporary: Fostering New South African Arts Director of GIPCA 2010-2015; Institute for Creative Arts (2016 on)
Conclusion: A Sense of Ending
Appendix: Indians in South Africa
Bibliography
Index
