10h00 Loss, and the Silent Room
Performance in collaboration with the Windybrow Arts Centre
Windybrow Arts Centre
Corner Nugget and Pietersen Streets, Doornfontein, 2000, Johannesburg
We open the final day of the programme with a performance in collaboration with The Windybrow Arts Centre.
The WAC is the fourth division of the Market Theatre Foundation, framing itself as a space for thought leadership, literacy and Pan African expression. The WAC, as a Pan African centre of the arts, occupies a Heritage house in Hillbrow built by a mining engineer, Theodore Reneurt, during the height of the Johannesburg gold rush over a century ago. The house has recently been refurbished, with funding from the Department of Sport, Arts & Culture, to reflect its original architectural splendour and lustre. Today the WAC has opened its doors to the community of Hillbrow as a Pan African centre of the arts in the hope of igniting a vibrant love for Pan African theatre and the arts within the community of Hillbrow. One of the essential elements of Pan Africanism is the celebration of Africa and the celebration of the diverse cultural identities of the continent and the diaspora. The WAC is well placed to embrace this opportunity. Embedded in the heart of Pan Africanism in Johannesburg, Hillbrow is an internal port for numerous migrators from the continent, creating an opportunity to tap into the cultural wealth contained in the avenues of the inner city. Together with the community of HiIlbrow the WAC intends to create lasting programmes that reflect the heritage of the area and, through art, encourage opportunities that empower the youth with knowledge systems that will expand their horizons and expand their vision.
Loss, and the Silent Room
Grief and loss are spaces held to house the remnants of transition and change.
They are a silent room and quiet ruminations, thoughts and conversations echoed continuously. They are Loss movement and meditation, as simple in their reminder of life as wandering through a home lived in. They are what commands us to tell stories and share memories, to invite others to witness us and what we have lost through us. When we sit with the loss of, there comes the demand to let go and release. Relinquishing lies at the centre of how we build grieving spaces in communion and solitude.
This sharing of performances is a reflection on how we construct grief and engage repair, and what we find or do not find in healing. It is an invitation to be witness and participant, to ask and consider:
- How do we seek healing or repair when the thing lost sits in the present?
- How do we craft rooms and spaces to hold all of who are in the moment of loss, through the loss, and when it becomes a memory, an echo?
- How can we invite others into the homes, shrines, monuments, bodies we construct to make this liminality tangible?
- How do we experience loss as individuals yet in community?
- And, sometimes, as life demands, how do we embrace loss and allow it to walk us onwards?
This is a ritual of repair, rebirths, and recovery found through stories, song, our bodies, memories, words, walking, invitation, silence, stillness, laughter, dance, and all the life in-between.
Loss, and
the Silent Room is stage directed by Uvile Ximba with the assistance of Toby Ngomane. The performance features Belita Andre, Thandiwe Mqokeli, Masai Sepuru and Uvile Ximba.
15h00 Programme Closing
in collaboration with The Forge, Braamfontein
The Forge
87 De Korte Street, Braamfontein, 2001, Johannesburg
We close the Johannesburg programme at The Forge in Braamfontein. Our guest speaker for the closing is the Power Talks Eastern Cape Curator, Buntu Fihla who will offer a reflection on the Johannesburg Power Talks Programme. Danai Mupotsa and Naadira Patel will facilitate a closing discussion with the audience, followed by a listening session with Ghaurinisa ‘Ms G’ Galeta, and ultimately closing with a live performance by
The Wretched.
The Forge is a welcoming, multi-use space in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, at the corner of De Korte and Reserve Streets in the heart of the largest student district of the African continent, and close to both of Johannesburg’s universities. It is designed to facilitate genesis, presentation and analysis of radical ideas from Pan-African, socialist, feminist and other progressive perspectives. The Forge is a space for the expression and discussion of ideas, for new encounters, and for the development of solidarities that embrace not only socially authorised intellectuals but also intellectuals in progressive popular organisations. These organisations include - as both protagonists and audiences - trade unions, social movements, community organisations, women’s organisations, student organisations, artistic and cultural workers, migrant groups, LGBTQI++ groups, the media and the historically censored, erased and maligned in general.
The Wretched is a conceptual/theoretical project which is not an interpretation of a written text, The Wretched of the Earth by psychiatrist, revolutionary and intellectual, Frantz Fanon - but a sitting along with. The outfit consists of the following: vocalist and sound-scaper Gabi Motuba, Tumi Mogorosi on drums, sound artist Andrei Van Wyk and filmmaker, Zen Marie. This project explores the sound through the lens of a shriek, a scream, a moment at the end of the limit of struggle accompanied by visuals of ungraspable and vast lands. Theoretically this aligns itself with a history of sonic writing and visual representation that has been the means to sit with trauma or as refrains of such.
As a final send off for the Johannesburg Power Talks programme we offer up food, drink, love and music.
This will include a listening session with
Ms G. Ghairunisa, Ms G, Galeta, a “born and bred jazz baby” with professional experience sitting at the crux of creative and traditional development support (primarily in health) - the common thread being a grounded approach to valuing cultural capital in international exchanges and anti-racism in practice. As a consultant and producer of creative projects, Galeta has supported artists and institutions over the past decade or so. Ms G has roots in the Cape Flats and Connecticut, but maintains active collaborative relationships with business and professional entities across three continents. She writes sometimes, and compiles constantly