Biography
Mwenya B. Kabwe is a Zambian-born maker of theatre and performance, facilitator of creative processes, a performer, writer, arts educator, and scholar. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Theatre Dance & Performance Studies (CTDPS) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where she is currently a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Theatre Section. Her creative practice and research are focused on contemporary African theatre and performance, migration, immersive and site- specific performance work, live art, collaborative and interdisciplinary art-making, and re-imagining African futures. She has lectured at the UCT Drama Department, Wits School of Arts division of Theatre & Performance, and the Market Theatre Laboratory. She is a co-curator of the Unrehearsed Futures conversation series and a curatorial partner in the OpenScape Network. Her current projects include working as dramaturg for William Kentridge and incubating several collaborative interdisciplinary experiments for Season 10 at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg.
Synopsis
Undoing the Plot is a project that explores the question posed by Ogutu Muraya, “What is the labour of different kinds of undoing?”, and uses Saidiya Hartman’s text The Plot of Her Undoing, commissioned and published by the Feminist Art Coalition, as a source text to create a new work in the form of a poetic performance installation for the 2026 Live Art Festival.In line with my research interests in dramaturgy, migration and genres of black migrant cultural production, the work will explore waywardness, fugitivity and migrititude as practices of possibility. In line with what I consider to be my literary performance practice, Undoing the Plot will consider how one might unestablish, unlearn, undress, by interrogating the idea of Plot in traditional dramatic literature and how it often serves to maintain the status quo. In a site-responsive approach to the physical and epistemic structures of the university as well as the traditional theatre building, the work will consider the visual presence of words through projected text, challenge the hierarchy of literature over orature, and consider black feminist orality as decolonial practice.
