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The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) in collaboration with Pro Helvetia presents the critically-acclaimed production of Boris Nikitin’s "Hamlet", in which the Swiss author and director transforms Shakespeare’s famous work into an experimental contemporary performance. In a mix of documentary play and music-theatre, enigmatic performer and electronic musician Julia*n Meding takes on the role of a contemporary Hamlet who revolts against reality and audience. Like Hamlet rebelling against the Royal Court, Meding agitates, mocks, flirts with and tries to seduce the audience.
“In exploring the breakdown of language due to trauma, a journey to ‘the far places’ of human experience, I want to examine the idea of love and desire, and how eros shapes this transformative process,” says writer Mishka Hoosen. “In looking at Call it a Difficult Night and other works, I want to examine the role of love in shaping and transforming language and understanding, and consider what that might say about our current state of transformation as a wounded country.”
Today we live in a society scarred by history, crippled by a lack of transformation, subjugated by the spectacle of global capitalism, marked by inequality and alienation. “The question for me as a writer, is can we find a way to write that is equal to this moment” Stacy Hardy asks. “A writing that captures and confronts the present, with its new urgencies and particular forms of violence, including violence done to the body and to language?”
Why do some men hurt the women they claim to love? Professor Kopano Ratele’s lecture explores this question. Written in part as a response to a character in Pumeza Rashe-Matoti’s play, Unbroken Silence – which will be staged during the lecture – Ratele also considers why some women love the men who hurt them. “My interest,” Ratele says,“is in a certain play of affects connected to the desire to hurt others, to being hurt, to forgiving, to both affection and hatred, so as not to offer explanations that easily snap into place.”