Current News
Current News
PEN South Africa and the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) present the 2018 Day of the Imprisoned Writer, on which writers will give readings and presentations in solidarity with jailed artists around the world. One of the most important dates on PEN’s international calendar, the event promises to be an engaging and meaningful evening, featuring some of South Africa’s most prominent writers.
Read a review of the ICA Live Art Festival '18 by Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), Ketu H. Katrak
In searching for the spirit of her late grandmother, Mbuya Lilian Chigumadzi - one of the heroines of her book These Bones Will Rise Again (2018) reflecting on Zimbabwe’s de facto coup – Panashe Chigumadzi deploys the black feminist strategy of biomythography in order to transgress traditional narrative, genre, and history.
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) presents the ICA Live Art Festival 2018 scheduled to take place from 1–16 September. The full programme is now available for download.
The figure of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela the mother is a symbol of the orchestrated break down of the African family. Her life in Soweto is marked by the perpetual invasion or breaking in and tearing, or breaking of her home. Similarly, the figure of Winnie Mandela the social worker is a symbol of resistance to this perpetual breaking, a role that takes her outside of her home to tend to the needs of others who are invariably suffering the breaking of their own families and lineages. Now that we are in an a post-Mandela era of naming our national pathologies, what follows the naming?
In this Great Texts / Big Questions performance, poetry collective Rioters in Session will present a gentle, intuitive space for womxn poets of colour to share their work, with readings by: Ashley Makue, Koleka Putuma, Allison-Claire Hoskins, Afeefa Omar and Siphokazi Jonas. The event will be hosted by Khanyisile Mbongwa.
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.”