Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa offers the first full-length monograph on the award-winning choreographer, theater director, curator, and creative artist in contemporary global performance. Working within the contexts of African studies, dance, theater, and performance, Ketu H. Katrak explores the extent of Pather's productive career but also places him and his work in the South African and global arts scene, where he is considered a visionary.
Pather, a South African of Indian heritage, is known as a master of space, site, and location. Katrak examines how Pather's performance practices place him in the center of global trends that are interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and multimedia and that cross borders between dance, theater, visual art, and technology.
Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa offers a vision of an artist who is strategically aware of the spatiality of human life, who understands the human body as the nation's collective history, and who is a symbol of hope and resilience after the trauma of violent segregation.
Table of Contents:
Preface: Personal Journey to Discovering Jay Pather
Introduction: Pather's Spatial Politics within South Africa's Historical and Political Landscape
Journeys across Political, Socio-racial and Geographic Borderlines: Interconnecting the Present, Past, and Future
1. Crossing (over): Indian Ocean Migrations Pather's Historical Dance-Dramas
2. Race and Space Matter: Outdancing Apartheid's Grip (1980s and 1990s) The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Choreographed Critiques of Broken Promises Post-1994 Testimonies; Laws of Recall; Unclenching the Fist, Forked Tongues, Shifting Spaces, Tilting Time
The Transitional and the In-between: Theoretical and Creative Engagements with Urban Geography (2000-2015)
3. Site-Specific Cartographies of Belonging Cityscapes; Republic; Rite, Blind Spot
4. Site-Responsive Works of History and Memory Home; The Beautiful Ones Must be Born; Body of Evidence; Qaphela Caesar
Curatorial Choreographies: Challenges of Curating Public Art Festivals (2007–Present)
5. A New Kind of Performance-Curation of Live Artists Director of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (2010-2015), now the Institute for Creative Arts (2016 on) Spier Contemporary: Fostering New South African Arts Director of GIPCA 2010-2015; Institute for Creative Arts (2016 on)
Conclusion: A Sense of Ending
Appendix: Indians in South Africa
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Ketu H. Katrak is Professor in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora, Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World, and Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy: A Study of Dramatic Theory and Practice.
Review :
Katrak's text offers the first sustained scholarly account of the disruptive subversion, generative promise, and persistently evolving performance manifestoes of one of South Africa's most prominent and prolific arts practitioners and thinkers.
- Juanita Finestone-Praeg (Journal of the African Literature Association) This is a rich, complex book that tackles and criss-crosses race, space, social and gender divides across historic periods, continents, local and global contexts. This is what makes it amazing and also challenging to read. It is theoretically rich and at times challenging to hold the many different theorists, reviewers' views, and different paradigms being invoked at once.
- Yvett Hutchison (South African Theatre Journal) With its historical, cultural, and spatial contextualization of an artist whose work has cross many gendered and racial boundaries, Katrak's Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa is a benchmark for future scholarship on South African dance and performance.
(Praxis)
