Biography
Lonwabo Notana is an interdisciplinary feminist performance artist working across theatre, performance, writing, video, sound design, and installation. Her practice interrogates patriarchy, South African rape law, and the afterlives of historical violence through research-led, embodied performance. Engaging archives such as the amaXhosa Cattle-Killing and the figure of uNongqawuse. She examines how gendered narratives are silenced, distorted, or erased within legal and cultural systems. Her work explores rage, testimony, and embodied memory as creative methodologies, asking how the body can function as both archive and site of resistance. Through layered performance structures that combine text, sound, and spatial intervention, Notana investigates how law, storytelling, and power intersect in contemporary South Africa.
Synopsis
26 years and counting is an exploration of the ongoing aftermath of sexual violence and the complex, often invisible labour of surviving as a woman. It considers trauma not as a singular event located in the past, but as something that can continue to inhabit the body, memory, and everyday life.
At its centre is the question: what does it mean to survive something that does not simply end when violence ends?
The work reflects on the ways survivors are required to continually negotiate their bodies, their memories, their safety and their sense of self. Survival can become a repetitive process of trying to regain control, to restore what has been disrupted, and to continue living while carrying an experience that cannot always be put into words.
The performance is concerned with the exhaustion produced by this continual negotiation. It attends to the physical and emotional costs of carrying trauma, particularly within a society where women are often expected to endure, recover, remain composed and move forward. In this sense, survival itself becomes a form of labour.
Rather than attempting to represent rape directly, the work turns towards its afterlife: the residue, repetition, vulnerability and exhaustion that can remain within the body. It asks how violence is remembered physically and what happens when the body becomes both the site where trauma is carried and the site through which resistance is expressed. The work is ultimately an encounter with the unfinished nature of survival, a meditation on the difficulty of continuing, and on what it means to remain within a body that remembers.