The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) is interdisciplinary in its approach and fosters innovative practice and research in the creative and performing arts. Since its founding in 2008, the ICA has engaged artists, curators, scholars and practitioners through performances, lecture series, symposiums, workshops and flagship projects including the Infecting the City public art festival, the ICA Live Art Festival and The ICA Podcast.

Interdisciplinarity is a key theme of the Institute’s work, and projects are imbued with innovation and collaboration as well as a dialogue with urbanism and community. A key factor is the creation of possibilities for the cross-over between artist and researcher, especially concerning marginalised communities.

The development of these initiatives is incorporated in three main projects: 

  1. Graduate Programme and Fellowships in Interdisciplinary and Public Art. 
  2. Interdisciplinary Events that bring together university and community, staged in public spaces and accessed by a range of publics.
  3. Public Lecture Series, engaging with practitioners, academics, students and the public to interrogate issues of critical concern.

ICAFellowships2023

Graduate Programme (MA and PhD)

The following students received scholarships to pursue their Masters in Live Art, Interdisciplinary and Public Art with the Institute for Creative Arts in association with the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town, forming the 2023-2024 cohort:

Yonela Makoba is an artist born and raised in Mthatha, currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. She graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BSc in Environmental and Geographic Science. The multidisciplinary artist works with photography, performance art, sculpture, mixed media, and printmaking. All her explorations; African spirituality, memory, body politics, the scientific method, or loss, characterise her interest in understanding herself and the world around her.

Liphelo Matthews is a performance artist from Cape Town. In 2022, she completed her honours degree in Theatre and Performance specialising in Acting at the University of Cape Town. She was then awarded a full scholarship to attend the South African Lessac Kinesensics intensive, where over 3 weeks she received extensive voice training with participants and facilitators from all over Africa and the world. Liphelo’s theatre-making impulses draw from her interests in the (re)representation and (re)imaging of the Black body in performance in post-apartheid South Africa.

Lonwabo Notana is a first-year master's student at the University of Cape Town, where she delves into the intricate tapestry of the amaXhosa Cattle-Killing, focusing on Nongqawuse's conspicuous absence or intentional exclusion from the Cattle Killing archive. Her research extends into the contemporary Xhosa culture, exploring how the silencing and exclusion manifest in the modern context.

Freddy Nyezi is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar with a background in theatre, performance, and education. Having earned a Bachelor's degree in Theatre and Performance (Honours equivalent) and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education with English and Dramatic Arts as teaching subjects, Freddy brings a unique blend of artistic expertise and pedagogical insight to his creative pursuits.

Lorin Sookool is a so-called coloured, politically Black, queer, mothering, in(ter)dependent, South Afrikan dance artist. These lived experiences inform their practice which follows a process-based approach that is interdisciplinary, intuitive in nature and emergent in design. Sookool has worked with multiple local and international choreographers, residency bodies and performance platforms and in 2021, received the Pina Bausch Fellowship for dance and choreography.

Puleng Stewart is a director, writer, voice artist and performer. She writes of her MA work: “I would like to bring my interest and research of permaculture models into a collaborative creation of permanent and public site-specific installations. By actively affecting the cityscape itself I would hope to play a part in moving these critical ecological conversations out of the bubbles of privilege in which they currently exist in South Africa.”

The following students received scholarships to pursue their PhD in various departments with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity:

Rehane Abrahams is an actress, theatremaker, performer and writer from Cape Town. Her practice and research focus on decolonial rituals of healing for body and land. She has performed several works, from Shakespeare to contemporary productions in South Africa and abroad. She was a recipient of the FNB Vita Award for Best Actress in 2001. She is a co-founder of The Mothertongue Project, a collective of women artists. Her training includes performance at UCT, classical Javanese dance and Body Weather Farm Butoh.She has also appeared in numerous television shows, including SOS on ETV and as Zelda in Hotnotsgode.

Aika Swai holds a Master’s degree from the Department of Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, Palo Alto, United States, and is currently completing her PhD at the Department of English at UCT. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary African, Caribbean and Native American literature, and how to teach this literature in multicultural classrooms. She is interested in the representation and communicability of so-called supernatural events and debates around epistemology in the postcolonial setting. She has more than 15 years of teaching experience at high school and undergraduate levels, including curriculum development and instructional coaching. Her core competencies include strong communication and editing skills, expertise in drama-based instructional strategies, and fluency in English, Swahili and German.

Nkosenathi Ernie Koela’s practice lies in indigenous music therapies. Using interdisciplinary practice, including his practice as an Afrikan multi-instrumentalist, Koela explores how healing practices through sound create space that manifests spiritually and materially. Koela has been a performer and instrumentalist for over 16 years. Alongside playing instruments, he also teaches others how to play traditional instruments. This he does as a testament to his ancestry – the long line/s of traditional instrumentalists, diviners/healers (amaGqirha namaXhwele) that run in his family who are masters of traditional San, Bantu, and Nguni music/heritage. He released his first solo “Inkaba,” an Afro-Spiritual collection of dreams and soundscapes, (Brazil, Cape Town) in 2018, and his second in 2021 (“Embo Ethongweni”).

Gavin Krastin is a South African performance artist and live artist, scenographer and arts educator. He is Cape Town-based and his work spans the worlds of theatre, visual arts and contemporary performance. Krastin's interests lie in the permeability and politics of the body’s representation, limitation and operation in alternative, layered spaces. His practice is inspired by his immediate South African environment and one’s positionality and transgression in the history embedded in its shifting socio-political landscape within a global-local framework.

Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga is co-founder of Clockwork HeART (a theatre company). Msimanga’s undergraduate studies were at Rhodes University where she graduated with distinction in Drama. She furthered her interest in academics at Wits University where she completed her Honours and Masters. She has performed a number of times at the National Arts Festival and showcased work at other festivals as a theatre-maker as well as the last FNB Dance Umbrella; for which she also wrote in The Citizen. She is a researcher, writer, director, choreographer, performer and theatre-maker as well as a passionate teacher. She has taught at Wits University and The National School of the Arts where she encourages critical thinking in the physical performance as well as the written reflection in theatre-making processes. She continues to stretch in her verve for theatrical praxis and has spoken at Drama for Life Conference and NAPTOSA conference as well as joining industrious teachers at the Inspired Teachers’ Conference. She is also a Features writer for Classicfeel Magazine and an avid essayist.

Gabrielle Goliath was born in Kimberley, South Africa, in 1983. She is a multidisciplinary artist known for her conceptually distilled and sensitive negotiations of complex social concerns, particularly in relation to situations of gendered and sexualised violence. She is currently working on a number of long-term performance projects, including her Elegy series, initiated in 2015. Elegy performances have been staged throughout South Africa and internationally, with each iteration marking the absent presence of a specific woman, or LGBTQI+ individual raped and killed in South Africa. Goliath is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Creative Arts (UCT), and holds a Master's degree in Fine Art, University of the Witwatersrand (with distinction). Drawing on music's capacity to both commemorate and evoke nostalgic memory, her current research aims to explore the possibilities and ethical demands of performing and making 'shareable' traumatic recall, specifically the lived and perpetually relived trauma of rape survivors in South Africa. As an artist, she has exhibited widely, and was recently selected to participate in the 11th Bamako Encounters Biennale (2017), Mali, where she was awarded the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize (Jury Prize) for her 5-channel video installation Personal Accounts. Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including the Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery and Wits Art Museum.

Khanyisile Mbongwa is an artist and curator from Cape Town. Mbongwa is the curator of Puncture Points, founding member and curator of Twenty Journey and former Executive Director of Handspring Trust Puppets. She is one of the founding members of arts collective Gugulective, Vasiki Creative Citizens and WOC poetry collective Rioters In Session. Mbongwa was a Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Institute of Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, where she completed her masters in Interdisciplinary Arts, Public Art and the Public Sphere, and has worked locally and internationally. She is also currently a PhD candidate at UCT where her work focuses on spatiality, radical black self love and imagination, and black futurity.

Formerly Chief Curator of the 2020 Stellenbosch Triennale, her other recent projects include: Process as Resistance, Resilience & Regeneration – a group exhibition co-curated with Julia Haarmann honoring a decade of CAT Cologne (2020), Athi-Patra Ruga’s solo at Norval Foundation titled iiNyanka Zonyaka (The Lunar Songbook) (2020) and a group exhibition titled History’s Footnote: On Love & Freedom at Marres, House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, Netherlands (2021). She was the curator of Liverpool Biennial 2023 'uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things'.

Fellowships

The ICA offers 4 kinds of fellowships:

  1. Visiting (National)
  2. Visiting (International)
  3. Live Art
  4. Curatorial

In addition to an ongoing engagement with UCT and the ICA, Fellows make presentations to the public. Fellowships in 2022 were awarded as follows:

Live Art Fellowship

Live Art Network Africa (LANA)

This Fellowship entailed research and dialogue with network partners, compiling databases and media leading towards the LANA gathering which will comprise performances and a symposium as well as the presentation of the in-progress LANA website in February 2023. The Fellowship provided the successful candidate with the opportunity to engage the ICA’s network of African artists, work closely with Live Art archives at the ICA, work alongside the research, technical and production staff at the ICA, and be mentored by Professor Jay Pather.

Refilwe Nkomo is a Johannesburg-based social practice storyteller, artist, curator and educator creating cultural and artistic interventions, programs and installations using various mediums including performance, video and text at the intersection of arts and social justice. She has held various positions in the arts and culture sector and is interested in memory, the archive, feminisms, afro-futurity, trauma, affect, and social change.

Khoi-San Scholarship

Two Live Art Scholarship were provided to First Nation artists to advance work that engaged themes of restitution and reclamation. The two fellowships were awarded to Denver Toroga and Deidre Jantjies.

Toroga Denver is a Khoikhoi First nation activist and writer who challenges the kakapusa or erasure of Khoikhoi narratives and the Khoikhoi language. He presented the work; 'ǁIs ge sada ge, sada ge ǁis (She is us and we are her) - a choreographed dance work that meditates on whose memory of Indigenous/First nation womxn, two spirited individuals, queer bodies, trans womxn who fell prey to the evils of the colony.

Deirdre Jantjies is a cultural activist passionate about the historical stories of women. She is the founder of Na Aap Productions, a fully integrated, broad-based production company, screening untold stories of Southern Africa. In 2020 she directed & produced 'Love Thy Neighbour' that won International awards, partnering with an Indian storyteller.

Jantjies presented the work Stories in die Wind. This film work tells a story through film of a young girl from Richtersveld, South Africa, who was born with the gift of communicating with rain, animals and plants.

Curatorial Fellowships

The curatorial fellowships entailed research, dialogue with artists, an exploration of installation spaces and the acquisition of works leading towards staging the Infecting the City Festival (ITC) in and around the city of Cape Town in November 2023. The fellowships provided successful candidates with the opportunity to engage with UCT’s research community, working alongside the Research, Technical and Production staff at the ICA, mentored by Professor Jay Pather.

In 2023 two fellows received fellowships — Themba Stewart and Magantharie Pillay.

Themba Stewart graduated from the University of Cape Town as a theatre maker in 2008. He has since worked as a freelance production manager, designer, writer, director, installation artist and performer. Themba has run multiple shows in theatre festivals, venues and site-specific spaces in the country and internationally. These include Infecting the City Festival (Multiple years – Technical manager 2014); Live Art festival; Magnet Theatre’s I Turned away and she was Gone and Every year every day I am Walking ; Jay Pather’s Body of evidence and Qaphela Caesar; Jemma Kahn’s In Boccaal Lupo.

Maganthrie Pillay has worked across theatre, television, features, film festivals and film training. Most recently, she taught Directing in a BA Film Degree programme. She became the first woman of colour to direct a feature film in South Africa, 34 South, in 2005, which premiered at Pan-African Film Festival. She directed Theatre Contours, Manje, Red Rituals and Maps of Memory, using a combination of Poetry and Performance.

The ICA also extended fellowships to Live Art Practitioner; Neliswa Rushualang.

Neliswa  Rushualang  began her training in 1994 under the Directorship of Mr Alfred Hinkel.  She continued her training until 1997 when the development program was launched as a professional company, The Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre. Rushualang worked with international teachers, choreographers and dance instructors; Blondell Cummings from the USA, Peter Badejo from London and BUZZ DANCE THEATRE from Australia to name a few.

~ 10 January 2023 ~