The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) launches Africa’s eminent performance art platform, the International LIVE ART Festival this spring from 1 to 16 September. Returning to Cape Town for its fourth anniversary, the ICA Live Art Festival 2018 showcases a gathering of some of the most influential visual and performance artists from South Africa as well as from around the world. Creating spaces for new transgressive work in a non-commercial environment, these innovative works will also be free of charge to all.
The programme delivers a rare selection of cutting edge works presented together in one programme navigating the various publics to the corners of their comfort zones, offering audiences an immersive experience to connect with relevant issues
confronting society.
The free and public nature of the ICA Live Art Festival is vested in a commitment to the value of contemporary live art as a means of facilitating encounters that encourage people to think and feel about a range of important issues in new and different ways.
With up to 40 different presentations, the Festival this year will be presented on four platforms. The first, entitled Trajectories, will focus on the development and histories of live art, comprising productions that emerge from different lineages. Notably, a number of artists connect contemporary live art with classical African tradition, reminding us that the presence of live art on the African continent long predates the coinage of the term in the West.
In The Spotlight (a small selection of the works to be presented)
PLATFORM ONE – Trajectories
Albert Ibokwe Khoza & Robyn Orlin
And so you see…our honourable blue sky andever enduring sun…canonly be consumed slice by slice
Sikhumbuzo Makandula & Mthwakazi
Ingoma ka
Tiyo Soga
Bongani
Madondo
Zulu: Credo Mutwa’s Fantasia in Praxis
Donna Kukama
We the Not-Not People! -Things done, not told. Inscribed, not written.
John Nankin
Death and Utopia (aka The Young Pioneers)
PLATFORM TWO – Actions and Activism
Nastio Mosquito
Respectable Thief
Nelisiwe Xaba
Bang Bang Wo
Sello Pesa
Bag Beatings
Mamela Nyamza
Black Privilege
PLATFORM THREE – In the Time of the Anthropocene
Cornelia Knoll
Untangling Colonial Ecologies
Uriel Orlow
Theatrum Botanicum
PLATFORM FOUR – Intimacies and Biography.
Laila Soliman, Stacy Hardy, Neo Muyanga & Nancy Mounir
Museum of Lungs
FAKA
The Factory
Athi-Patra Ruga
Things We Lost in the Rainbow
Sue Williamson
One Hundred and Nineteen Deeds of Sale
ICA Director and Curator of the Festival, Jay Pather said: “This interdisciplinary festival is designed to extend and in some respects challenge the public’s experience of live art and at the same time 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.“
LIVE ART performances will tour across public venues of the Mother City from the University of Cape Town’s Little Theatre Precinct, to Iziko National Galleries, Zeitz MOCAA, and various spaces in the city centre, such as the Cape Town Station, the Company’s Garden, the Planetarium and the Castle of Good Hope.
For programme details visit www.ica.uct.ac.za