Unrehearsed Futures   Serious Play on Thursday 13 May 2021
Channel: HowlRound Theatre Commons
Date: 2021-05-13

Presenting Unrehearsed Futures: Serious Play livestreaming on the global, commons-based peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv Thursday 13 May 2021 at 4 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4) / 9 a.m. BST (London, UTC +1) / 10 a.m. SAST (Cape Town, UTC +2) / 1:30 p.m. IST (Mumbai, UTC +5:30) / 6 p.m. AEST (Hobart, UTC +10).

This conversation is centred around how to think about facilitating decolonial pedagogy in theatre and performance generally, and physical and movement theatre specifically, which draws on the legacies of Jacques Lecoq. In light of a new vocational training school that has been birthed in Covid waters called ‘The Johannesburg School of Mask and Movement Theatre’, we will consider notions of how we might claim decolonial ownership of our pedagogies and practices.

Curator: Mwenya B. Kabwe
Mwenya B. Kabwe is a Zambian-born maker of theatre and performance, facilitator of creative processes, a performer, writer, arts educator and scholar with migrant tendencies. Her creative practice is focused on contemporary African theatre and performance, immersive and site specific performance work, live art, collaborative and interdisciplinary art making and re-imagining African futures. She has lectured and taught performance theory and practice in the Drama Departments at the University of Cape Town, Wits University and the Market Theatre Laboratory and is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town.

Speaker 1: Kyla Davis
Organization / School: Director of Well Worn Theatre Company and Co-Founder of The Johannesburg School of Mask and Movement Theatre
Kyla Davis is a theatre-creator and a home-maker. She cares deeply about our Earth, and the interconnected relationships between people and eco-systems. She believes in a just transition to a more sustainable future where life (human and non-human) is valued above profit. She is moved by the potential for the theatrical process to inspire hearts, radicalise minds and mobilise hands towards a more empathetic and caring world. Davis is powerfully drawn to choral work. She enjoys experimenting with the endless possibilities for play within an ensemble where there are no leaders and no followers but rather, a hivemind of hyper-present performers. She also loves to make masks and puppets to take outside and cause a ruckus!

Speaker 2: Manola-Gayatri Kumarswamy
Organization / School: Post-Doctoral Researcher (Theatre and Performance) | University of Witwatersrand School of Arts
Dr. Manola-Gayatri Kumarswamy is an artistic thinker, somatics informed performance practitioner, poet and transformation consultant. She received her PhD from Theatre and Performance Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Drama For Life & TAP Witwatersrand University exploring decolonial artistic research, performance and pedagogy practices. She is co-editing the Contemporary Theatre Review Special Issue What's Queer About Queer Performance now? and co-convenes the International Federation of Theatre Research's Performance as Research Working Group. She works with personal and systemic transformation with methods from arts practice, dream work and group work. She also co-facilitates trauma therapy workshops through DFL's Our HAPpy Place. She has taught in India and South Africa with a special focus on transdisciplinary work through creative research. She is currently on site in the Western Cape following a Melon Arts Research Africa grant to explore fluidity and queer decoloniality through writing residencies, ocean encounters, whale storiesm while writing a play called Kanchi and the Ocean's Bellow. Her earlier research explored breath techniques with Adishakti, Kalakshetra Manipur, Gardzienieche and Grotowski practitioners. She is an Honorary Member of the Jung Centre India.



https://howlround.com/happenings/livestreaming-conversation-unrehearsed-futures-serious-play