Future Advisory Board collaborations with Psi Lexicon – opportunities and events

During 2022, the Future Advisory Board convened a number of remote gatherings and collaborative events taking up the question of how and where performance research happens, and the ecologies of knowledge that emerge and disappear. This year we’ve teamed up with PSi’s Lexicon to extend this exploration to the roots and routes of research pathways. As part of the 2023 PSi conference in South Africa, we are hosting two special performance-as-research workshops for early career researchers, postgraduate students, artist-researchers and arts workers from across the globe. Trace the routes that connect global performance practices and be rooted in place through the facilitation of two incredible South African artists.

The first workshop is an online movement workshop with Smangaliso Ngwenya and the second is an in-person research mapping workshop with Linda (Mdena) Thibedi. The workshops build on each other thematically but are not interdependent—you are welcome to attend one or both! 

Journeying towards the brink of the All Being [online workshop with Smangaliso Ngwenya] 

27 July 2023 @ 13.00 Johannesburg time[Duration: 90 mins]

In this first workshop we map our research journeys in and through the body. Multi-disciplinary artist Smangaliso Ngwenya leads a 90-minute embodied practice exploring the relationship between African dance and conceptual, ancestral, and whole-body rootedness. The session is open to any skill level and performing background and will introduce African dance techniques across a range of styles, whilst welcoming the ways in which these converge in our own practices. 

Countermapping the Body [in-person conference workshop with Linda (Mdena) Thibedi]

3 August 2023 @ 15.30 Johannesburg time [Duration: 180 mins]

Presented in-person during the PSi conference in Johannesburg, this gentle three-hour participatory session will trace our research processes through exploratory and experimental mapping practices. Through drawing, writing, moving, and talking, we will weave connections about research in an embodied way and use this to question the ways and history of performance studies’ rootedness. As part of this workshop special guest artist Linda (Mdena) Thibedi will run a workshop exploring the experience of bodies in the aftermath of crises. Thinking through the tools and modes of Drama Therapy and Dance Therapy the workshop will map the body as a repository of critical movement. 

You can sign up to this workshop through the PSi conference website. More information, including access details, will be published shortly on the conference website.

Both workshops are in dialogue with this year’s PSi conference theme of ‘uhambo’ and ‘uhambo oluzilawuyalo’, and reflect our collaborative focus of “roots and routes” that looks to identify source points, lineages, branches, and connections between our community’s collective practices. These workshops are being delivered in partnership with PSi Lexicon, a living project that reflects on the changing discourses, grammars, embodied practices, epistemologies and creative traces of performance studies. Departing from embodied wandering as a set of methods for unravelling performance studies, these workshops offer spaces to embrace and question our rootedness and the creative negotiations, tensions and entanglements of definitions. Here we trace the ideas and concepts as they travel between or appear in places, times, languages, people and communities and the materials that emerge from the workshops will go into the Lexicon as a series of entries.