Current News
Current News
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) is proud to announce that the ICA Live Art Festival 2018 will take place from 1–16 September 2018. This interdisciplinary festival is designed to challenge and extend the public’s experience of live art in a non-commercial environment and make accessible the work of visual and performing artists who explore new forms, break boundaries, flout aesthetic conventions, tackle controversy, confront audiences and experiment with perceptions.
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) is proud to announce the second installment of the 2018 Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series, with a line-up featuring: Rioters in Session, a community of womxn poets of colour established by Ashley Makue, Koleka Putuma, Khanyisile Mbongwa and Allison-Claire Hoskins; Milisuthando Bongela, Arts Editor of the Mail & Guardian and writer, cultural worker and filmmaker; and Panashe Chigumadzi, writer, journalist and author of the recently released These Bones Will Rise Again.
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.”
Award-winning novelist Claire Robertson offers a short history of imagining and mis-imagining ourselves, and thoughts on using the tools and gifts of fiction to choose and understand the framework of those “things that are no longer and things that are not yet.”
‘I’m a little concerned about the kind of masculinity we teach our sons,’ says poet and musician Itai Hakim. This concern is at the centre of Fuccboi, a collaborative and interactive lecture-performance presented by Hakim and Siyabonga Mthembu (The Brother Moves On). Fuccboi is a sonic exploration of masculinities and ways of being in the world that men inherit. At once a private/public reckoning with the past and present, Fuccboi is also an attempt at dreaming different futures.
In this performance-lecture, Toni Stuart shares her process of writing "Krotoa-Eva’s Suite", a cape jazz poem in three movements which seeks to re-imagine Krotoa-Eva’s story in her own voice. Using live performance, audio-visuals, and interactive elements, she will share what she has learnt, and her experience of journeying with this story.
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) launches its 2018 Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series in April, with a line-up that features acclaimed and award-winning writers, artists, academics and musicians. The theme underpinning this Great Texts series is drawn from Achille Mbembe’s foreword to Fiona Forde’s An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema & the ‘New’ ANC in which he writes: ‘[South Africa] is still caught … between things that are no longer and things that are not yet.’ The talks comprising the series will explore South Africa’s state of in-betweenness, as evoked in Mbembe’s words, from the vantage point of things unfinished, things unwritten – an exploration of mutability as opposed to certainty from academic, historical, poetic, musical, artistic and literary points of view. The series, then, is also an investigation of becoming, and how we might become differently.
The launch of the Live Art Network Africa (LANA) is scheduled to take place from 17 – 20 February 2018 at the University of Cape Town’s Hiddingh Campus. The three days of LANA will be divided into a symposium comprising conference sessions, open to the public, where local and international speakers will present papers, as well as networking sessions where invited delegates will discuss the vision for the Network, and how this can be taken forward. The symposium is open to all but the networking sessions are by invitation only. The programme can be downloaded in the full story.
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town (UCT) invites applications for two curatorial fellowships in live art. The curatorial fellowship entails research, dialogue with artists, exploring funding possibilities, an exploration of installation spaces and the acquisition of works leading towards staging a series of live art events in and around the city.