Pro-vocations: Roots and Wings – An International Exchange on Puppetry Arts in Africa at the University of the Western Cape’s Iyatsiba Lab of the Centre for Humanities Research
Iyatsiba Lab of the Centre for Humanities Research courtyard. Courtesy of CHR.
The opportunity to co-host the Pro-vocations conference with the UNIMA Training Commission, UNIMA Africa Commission, and UNIMA South Africa at the University of the Western Cape’s Iyatsiba Lab of the Centre for Humanities Research showcased the work of some of the most crucial thinkers and arts practitioners involved in the arts of object theatre in Africa and beyond.
Those gathered at the four-day meeting of staged performance and academic exchange found that the enactments of puppetry arts in Africa led to a distinct history of object life. An illustrious line-up of practitioners showcased their work through the conference panel discussions, workshops, performances, and interventions.
Extract performance of Hamlet. Janni Younge Productions, South Africa. Courtesy of CHR.
The puppet, enshrined in the experiences of slavery, colonialism, and other forms of racial modernities, effectively led to the streets, where the simulacrum of everyday life sheds light on the crucial lessons Africa offered to help us respond to our global predicaments. A key to unravelling the specificities and techniques in African puppetry was its illumination of what lay ahead in the co-evolution of humans and technology. The puppet was not simply a copy of the competing dynamics; it was located midway between humans and technology in this evolutionary schema. The focus on the co-evolution of humans and technology laid the grounds for reflective possibilities necessary to craft a liveable life from the encroachments of technical objects on memory and judgment. In its long struggle against slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, African puppetry traditions responded to being historically reduced to object life. As Amos Fergombe, the French-Cameroonian theatre scholar, noted in his thought-provoking presentation at the conference, the puppet was the scene of a doubling that exposed the claims made about the very future of the human as the subject.
The consequence of the puppet is becoming more pertinent in a world where the overwhelming of life by technological temporal objects threatens a slide into the uncanny valley. With no recourse to an easy escape, the puppet that was the subject of the Pro-vocations Conference performed our entrapments in the scripts handed down in the unfolding drama of servitude and submission while creating the space for us to reflect on the prospects for imagining alternative futures. We are on a threshold but seemingly unable to crossover for which an aesthetic education will prove ever more indispensable and vital.
Much of the conference took its cue from the work of the two giants of African puppetry, the Sogolon Theatre of Mali and the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa. A plethora of practices and interpretations about the meaning of puppetry arts drawn from experiences in Cote d’Ivoire, Tunisia, Togo, Kenya, Burundi, Uganda, South Africa, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mozambique provided a comprehensive overview of techniques and theory of puppetry in Africa– set in conversation with traditions from Argentina, Brazil, Switzerland, Spain, Poland, Italy, the UK, Ireland, and China.
Yaya Coulibaly, president and founder of the Sogolon Company, master puppeteer, storyteller, director and playwright, during his workshop, entitled ‘Role of masks and puppets in Bambara society in Mali’. Courtesy of CHR.
Accompanied by performances staged in Khayelitsha, Observatory, and Woodstock, the conference opened a generous space for deliberation, training, and an exchange of ideas about techniques in object theatre.
Brilliantly curated by Aja Marneweck, Janni Younge, and Itumeleng wa Lehulere, Pro-vocations introduced visitors to the CHR to learn about the work of the Iyatsiba Lab and to meet resident puppeteers, Ukwanda Puppet and Design Collective (Luyanda Ngodlwana, Sipho Ngxola, Siphokazi Mpofu) in what the legendary Yaya Coulibaly from the Sogolon Centre called a temple to puppetry in Africa.
We welcome you to peruse the textures of this exciting exploration of puppetry arts and to journey with us in our inquiry into the meaning of object theatre in our contemporary conjuncture.
Extract performance of STAINS. Katlego Chale, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Courtesy of CHR.
The Iyatsiba Lab is the University of the Western Cape’s first arts and humanities research hub in the city.
By renovating a former derelict school building in Greatmore Street, Woodstock, UWC has taken a bold new step into the city, breaking through the spatial and intellectual circumscriptions of apartheid that had largely denied the university access to the city centre.
The CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab houses a Laboratory of Kinetic Objects (LoKO) in partnership with Handspring Puppet Company; a Documentary Film Training Programme with Emmy Award Winner Francois Verster; and a Sound, and New Media Programme. It also hosts an international Advanced Studies Research Seminar to rethink the meaning of post-apartheid freedom through the arts, a Public Lecture Programme, a gallery and exhibition space and an arts incubator for its Artists in Residence Programme.
Wafel and Pretzel. Puppet Theatre of Geneva, Switzerland. Courtesy of CHR.
Le chat pélerin. Compaignie Nama, Yaocuba Magassouba, Mali. Courtesy of CHR.
The Lab is host to the Herds Project, an arts intervention that will see 600 life-size animal puppets migrating from the DRC to Norway on a climate crisis campaign directed by Nisar Zoabi. It has also hosted the CHR’s series of public lectures, which included UN Commissioner Navi Pillay, Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, and Judge Dikgang Mosoneke. Besides the Encounters Documentary Film conference in 2024, the Lab was honoured to host Yaya Coulibaly, the legendary Malian puppeteer who leads the Sogolon Centre in Bamako. The centre is hosting a photography exhibition, ‘Resilience to Rebirth: Stories from the Streets’ at its centre in Woodstock, Cape Town, South Africa, which is on view until February 2025.
Premesh Lalu holds the NRF/British Academy SA-UK Bilateral Chair in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Lalu is the author of The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (HSRC Press, 2009) and Undoing Apartheid (Polity Press,2022).
For more information, please visit the Iyatsiba Lab.
