Bubblegum Club

Tag: British Council Connect ZA Arts Programme

  • MIXED SPACE // delving into the blind spots in South Africa’s racial conversations

    “So…What are you?”

    The short film MIXED SPACE by Zara Julius looks into the experiences of middle class, mixed race individuals, teasing out the questions they have received from others and the ones they hold within themselves. The film draws on Zara’s own experience as a mixed race individual. South Africa has a complex and violent history around race, with the four Apartheid racial categories still firmly embedded within people’s interpretative frameworks used when interacting with other people. In the film we see participants reflect on the moments they first had to look at themselves through the societal lens, and the encounters they had which forced them to do so at a young age. Interviewees speak candidly about the violent questions and inferences they have tried to process throughout their lives, as well as share their points of reference for their racial identities in the past, the reasons why they were able to identify with them then, and perhaps not now.  We see raw discussions around other people transposing their discomfort, confusion or curiosity on to their bodies through stares and claims about what they look like. This film delves deeply into issues around racial categorization and the “blind spots” in South Africa’s racial conversations. The film is also a space for self-identification.

    Having directed, filmed and edited the film herself, in our interview Zara explained that her background in Social Anthropology has formed an important foundation for her methodologically and has allowed her to see the value in investing in a long term project.

    While the short film MIXED SPACE has only recently come to life, the foundations for it began a few years ago with a series of focus groups in her apartment. At the time Zara did not anticipate that these would manifest into a film. In these discussions participants would share their experiences of what it is like to grow up being mixed race or racially ambiguous. Zara recorded these focus groups. In between the chats, tears and laughter, and being mixed race herself, Zara felt as though there was something powerful in the way that people were opening up about how they grew up, the questions they have had to face, as well as the unpacking of racial categorization. This feeling was coupled with a desire to do something visual.

    She started working on a photo series which involved asking participants where they would like to be photographed, giving them the ability to control how they are represented and the objects they would like to appear in the frame. While working on this photo series she started thinking about the idea for a film, and shot a pilot of the film with one of the participants in the project. Interest around the film has snowballed and has become a lot larger than Zara anticipated, and she is pleasantly surprised.

    The experiences that the participants in the film share speak to understanding and unpacking racial injustice. They share the pain, violence and exhaustion that comes from macro level racial categorization as well as micro gestures that influence the way in which mixed race people have to try and navigate space and interactions with other people.

    Directing, filming and editing the film herself allowed the moments with the participants to feel conversational, and well as a form of her coming to terms with the questions and experiences that she has had throughout her life.

    Zara finds it important for her work to be interdisciplinary, and so the first screening of MIXED SPACE at the AVA Gallery in Cape Town was presented to audiences as an art installation. In discussion about this choice, Zara expressed that she “really wants to be able to make work that makes sense in a gallery space, but also in an academic space, as well as a populous space or like a non-hierarchical space. [It should be] applicable to all those areas”.

    The second screening took place Goldsmiths College in London. Keleketla! Library in Johannesburg will also host a screening of MIXED SPACE on the 6th of July.

    Credits:

    Zara Julius – director, producer, cinematographer and editor

    Daniel Gray – music

     

    The film features:

    Kyla Phil – film maker and performer

    Brian Kamanzi – writer, decolonial thinker, engineer, educationist

    Qiniso van Damme – model, actress, socially major

    Alexandria Hotz – decolonial thinker, activist

    Kenny Morifi-Winslow – influencer, fashion anthropologist

    Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh – author, political analyst, hip-hop artist

    Meghan Ho Tong – architect

    Sekh-Fei De Lacy – brand strategist, photographer, videographer

    Yanos De Vries – DJ

    Thulile Gamedze – artist, arts writer, decolonial thinker

    Londi Gamedze – musician

    Lindiwe Malindi – academic, writer

    Sankara Gibbs

    Anita Makgetla – fashion designer, copywriter

     

    ‘This article forms part of content created for the British Council Connect ZA 2017 Programme. To find out more about the programme click here.’

  • REFUGE – cross-continent stories of resilience

    It is plausible to assume that South Africa and the United Kingdom are vastly different. However during the conceptualisation process for a proposal to be part of the British Council Connect ZA’s new partnership initiative, master playwright, Amy Jephta and writer and director, Paul Blinkhorn, spotted the similarities between South Africa and the UK. The standout similarity being refugees.

    Immigration is a topical issue in both states. The Brexit proposition brought forward the discomfort that the UK had with refugees and being a beacon of hope on continent, South Africa attracts an influx of refugees.

    “This idea or thinking around refugees and where refugees go and where they belong and what they are going through, leaving what kind of situations they are leaving is a global conversation and it is both relevant to South Africa and to the UK and it was a topic that we felt we could connect on and say something about,” said Amy.

    The project called REFUGE that will take place in Cape Town, South Africa and Manchester, UK seeks to tell the stories of the lived experiences of refugees in these cities. The performance will “use actors to portray those stories, to speak those testimonies, to use those exact works, to give life to those stories,” said Amy.

    Currently Amy and Paul are in the first phase of their project, which involves week-long interviews with refugees in Cape Town. After transcribing and working on the text for their scripts, they aim to have an open reading of the testimonies about seeking refuge at the end of May in Cape Town.

    The project will later move to North Manchester, where the pair will follow the same procedure. However, they believe that the performance will take on different forms. “There is going to be a South African element…there is going to be a UK element and then I think there is going to be something beyond that, which is a mixture of the two,” said Paul.

    Amy and Paul have been in partnership with People Against Suffering, Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP) and Befriending Refugees And Asylum Seekers (BRASS), who have aided them in connecting with refugees.

    Furthermore, British Council Connect ZA has afforded Amy and Paul the opportunity to collaborate on a project that has the capacity to connect people with different aspects of the human experience. Moreover, REFUGE is a performance project that causes the audience to listen to the authentic stories of refugees. This project humanises refugees so there can be empathy within communities.

    So far both Amy and Paul have been left in awe with the resilience of the human spirit and everything refugees endure on a daily basis. The project will hopefully be made accessible beyond the theatres it will be housed in. There are plans to archive the material online so many more will be able to engage with the experiences of others.

     

    ‘This article forms part of content created for the British Council Connect ZA 2017 Programme. To find out more about the programme click here.’

  • The Fake Interpreter // A cross-art performance piece

    I had a conversation with writer/performer Sophie Woolley, dancer/choreographer Andile Vellem and director Gemma Fairlie on their collaborative mixed discipline show The Fake Interpreter.

    “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”  – Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

    This quote is at the top of every page of the blog that Sophie set up to document the process they are undertaking to put the production together. This quote ties together perfectly the core motivators behind their collaborative show. The first being the fake interpreter that was used at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service. The second being the necessity for a serious public conversation about the need for good, qualified interpreters. The third being a conversation around who controls language. And lastly, thinking about deaf power, deaf pain and deaf people being able to have these kinds of conversations on their own terms.

    Sophie made her name when she started out standing next to the dj box on literary nights at nightclubs in London. She created satirical characters based on the nightlife characters she saw and interacted with. She then received the opportunity to have a column in a lifestyle magazine for one of her characters. She later got the opportunity to write for theatre. Sophie comes from a deaf family and eventually become completely deaf herself in adulthood. While writing her one person show When to Run she was introduced to director Gemma Fairlie who assisted her in the physicality of her characters. Working as a freelance director, there has always been a lot of physicality in Gemma’s work. The two of them have worked together on a number of projects, with The Fake Interpreter being the second show which incorporates sign language.

    In 2013 Sophie was introduced to Andile and went to watch his show Unmute; a dance piece about his experiences growing up in the Eastern Cape and how he was not allowed to sign at school. “Sign language around the world is often oppressed,” Sophie explained. “Unmute is about my own story and the fact that I can’t tell my own story. I don’t have my own voice and it is like somebody keeping my mouth shut. With Unmute is it opening up that world for me,” Andile explained. Andile is the Artistic Director for a dance company, Unmute Dance Company, that he co-founded in 2013. With Sophie in awe of Andile’s work and having worked with him on the smaller performance I Am Not The Other at Artscape Disability Day 2015, Sophie wanted to work with him again.

    When the fake interpreter life event happened in 2013 Sophie felt annoyed, as well as a sense of helplessness. This was around the same time that Sophie had a cochlear implant. Reflecting more on the privileges of hearing and the oppression of sign language, three years later those feelings had not left. Sophie was encouraged to write about it and this project was selected to be part of the British Council Connect ZA Arts Programme for 2017. Meeting up with Andile again she was able to hear his life story and how he felt about the incident. “What Gemma did was point out the fact that we both felt angry and powerless, and we felt guilty but for different reasons, kind of about our inaction at the time. She asked us to fantasize about what we could have done instead. And so we had lots of crazy fantasies about how we could have stopped the fake interpreter and so that is how things [the script] started to change,” Sophie explained. The show developed into a multi-disciplinary re-writing of the memorial service based on their feelings and experiences.

    The show incorporates sign language with the sign language interpreter who supports Andile being part of the performance, and not simply signing on the side. “I am interested in integrating it [sign language] not just in an accessibility way but artistically,” Gemma explained, “We are trying to create a cross-art form piece that has dance in it, that has signing in it, that has video editing in it, that has storytelling in it. But that we bleed between these aspects. That it has that feeling of sort of creating a new genre where all of these aspects are vital to the storytelling.”. Reflecting on the importance of this show Sophie expressed that, “any kind of cultural output that shows deaf culture will be really powerful and help people to see this invisible world.”.

    Andile expressed that this show provides an opportunity for advocating for deaf rights and the need for sign language to be recognized worldwide.”It’s a beautiful language. It has got variations. Now we are doing theatre, and we are doing it in sign language! And we are following sign language linguistic structures,” Andile expressed. This goes back to the Nelson Mandela quote referenced earlier; the show speaks to people’s hearts.

     

    ‘This article forms part of content created for the British Council Connect ZA 2017 Programme. To find out more about the programme click here.’