ICA’s 2024 Live Art Festival ushers in Spring to Cape Town

The Mother City’s art enthusiasts are in for four jam-packed days of immersive and provocative culture with the University of Cape Town’s Institute for Creative Arts (ICA)’s prestigious Live Arts Festival (LAF) from 4 to 7 September 2024. The festival will be held at the centrally located UCT Hiddingh Campus in Gardens, Cape Town.

A highlight of Spring this year, this annual festival has uniquely allowed its audiences to experience and participate in a vibrant live art experience in a non-commercial environment since 2012. Historically, the Festival has created access to works by artists who are pushing the boundaries of form, flouting aesthetic conventions, engaging controversy, confronting audiences, and experimenting with perceptions.  2024 will be no different!

The festival is anchored around live art performances by renowned artists like Nigeria’s Jelili Atiku, Mozambican dancer and choreographer Pak Ndjamena, South Africa’s Godfather of performance art John Nankin, the magnificent meta-dance artist Nelisiwe Xaba, Sello Pesa and artist/academic donna Kukama. Making waves as big and spectacular are Chuma Sopotela, Qondiswa Jones, the Sisi Dance theatre from Tanzania, Gavin Krastin’s Arcade 2024, Oupa Sibeko, and Mthuthuzelii Zimba. 

For the 2024 festival, Professor Jay Pather, the Director of the ICA and curator, has focused the programming on a South-South axis with significant emphasis on creating conversations and relationships that galvanize the emergence of a new geo-cultural programme of collaboration, exchange and networking. He is passionate about the programme for this milestone edition of the LAF truly reflecting 2024 as a year of seismic shifts in geopolitical alliances:

Accordingly, a South-South Dialogue in tandem with the ICA’s 2024 Live Art Festival’s programme highlights include:

• Discussions,talks and lectures:  Prominent arts academics, producers and curators will be the stars of these events. Audiences will be inspired and motivated by the likes of Andre Lepecki, Antonio Araujo, donna Kukama, N’gone Fall, nora chipaumire, Marlon Barrios Solanoarole, Carole Umulinga Karemera, Dr. Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Quito Tembe, Maria Jose Cifuentes and the like from Brazil, Columbia, Chile, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, Rwanda, Ghana, and South Africa. These events are intended to be the beginning of collaborations that will invigorate the power and creativity shared between countries of the south. 
   

• Performances: Leading the moving performances will be the impressive and globally renowned artist/activist and performance artist Jelili Atiku. Through his intriguing and often confrontational performances, he engages audiences about politics, climate change, and social justice. Equally breathtakingly talented is Nelisiwe Xaba, South-African choreographer and performer. She’ll be performing vRot, using mold and decay as a metaphor for the levels of corruption in South Africa, and the impact this has had on the country. These are just, but two of the artists featured in a performance art programme that is exciting and subversive. 

What a week it promises to be!

Come and experience the 2024 Live Art Festival in Cape Town this September:

Tickets for the Live Art Festival 2024 are available from R20 via Quicket. Tickets sales open on 11 August 2024 and are bound to sell out quickly so get yours today!

The ICA Live Art Festival 2024 promises to be a memorable arts week for Cape Town. For more information about the festival and its exhilarating programme, please visit  https://humanities.uct.ac.za/ica/projects/ica-live-art-festival. The programme will be available on the site from Friday 9 August 2024.

ICA’s 2024 Live Art Festival: Engaging a South-South Dialogue on the Arts and Festival Curation

Professor Jay Pather, the Director of the ICA and curator, said: ‘’Pressing against and through form is characteristic of artists who own live art (or ‘performance art’) as a practice. Emerging from a range of disciplines from dance to painting, artists break rank with disciplinary silos to create new variations of form and a visceral immediacy to art making. The immediacy is informed by contemporary political contexts, a need to cut through apathy and go beyond political cliches. Bourgeois containment and access give way to a freedom to leverage form to specific intention and an opacity in the work that disavows the need to ‘explain oneself’.  In South Africa, this has meant revisiting ancient African practices, ritual, gathering and ceremony within contemporary live art practice as part of a decolonial proposition to consider live art that existed from pre-colonial times, and which continues to vividly live in the contemporary moment.”

He spoke about the decolonial proposition that forms the core of the conference that runs alongside.

Accordingly, a South-South Dialogue in tandem with the ICA’s 2024 Live Art Festival’s programme highlights include discussions, talks and lectures by prominent arts academics, producers and curators representing South America and Africa.  They include Andre Lepecki (US), Antonio Araujo (Brazil), donna Kukama Germany/South Africa), N’gone Fall (Senegal), nora chipaumire (Zimbabwe/US), Maria Luisa Angulo, Carole Umulinga Karemera (Rwanda) Maria Jose Cifuentes (Chile), Marlon Barrios Solanos (US), Ana Copete (Senegal) , Quito Tembe (Mozambique), Dr Bernard Akoi-Jackson (Ghana), Ángela Marcela Beltrán Pinzón (Colombia), Jelili Atiku (Nigeria); Ka(ra)mi” (France) and Dr Lance Nawa (South Africa).

These events are intended to be the beginning of collaborations that will invigorate the power and creativity shared between countries of the south. 

He concluded by adding
  “Decolonial theory has its earliest formation in the global south.  Moreover, there is a mirroring of histories - the marginalizing of First Nations Peoples and an Afro South American population brought to South America through slavery. Going beyond the dominant north-south axis, we trust the visions of South American curators and policy makers alongside members of the Live Art Network Africa, will productively open fields of creativity, dissemination, and audience reception of work in new global formations.”