Great Texts/Big Questions: Monageng Motshabi
Motshabi will present When Victim Plays Victim and the Perpetrator Goes for the Kill…
This lecture draws on Motshabi’s experience staging the iconic play about the TRC, The Story I Am About to Tell, to explore how perpetrators and victims understand their roles in matters of reconciliation, and what forms their post-colonial identities take. Motshabi asks: what happens when actors who in some way still see themselves as victims are tasked with playing real-life victims of apartheid’s atrocities? Is there a point at which victimhood becomes a role maintained for its own kind of high or low? And is there a parallel between how actors on stage perform from a place of strength, and how ‘actors’ in real life hold onto the roles into which history has cast them?
Monageng Motshabi is the 2017 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for Theatre. Since studying at the Market Theatre Lab, Motshabi has written Echoes, which won a 2006 Naledi Award; Chasing Laughter, which showed at Mmabana Mafikeng and the National Arts Festival in 2014; and Book of Rebellations (co-written with Kgafela oa Magogodi), which was nominated for 3 Naledi Awards and 2 Fleur du Cap Awards. Amongst many other works, Motshabi directed The Story I Am About to Tell at the Soweto Theatre in 2015, nominated for 2 Naledi Awards, and Ompile Molusi’s Mogatapele, which recently showed at Mmabana Mafikeng.
Listen to the podcast here.
The lecture, followed by an open question and answer session, will take place from 6-7:30pm on Wednesday 12 April 2017 in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre, Old Medical School Building, UCT Hiddingh Campus, 31 – 37 Orange Street, Cape Town.
Refreshments will be served from 5:30pm. RSVP at ica@uct.ac.za
For more information, please contact the ICA office: +27 21 650 7156, ica@uct.ac.za, or Sascha Polkey at Rabbit in a Hat Communications: sascha@rabbitinahat.co.za | 021 300 0052.
About the ICA’s focus on the TRC
From 14 March to 19 April the Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series focuses on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – its vision, successes, failures and public perceptions then and now. UCT's Institutional Reconciliation and Transformation Commission (IRTC), which recently set up its steering committee, will look into the Shackville protests that occurred on UCT’s Upper Campus in February 2016, as well as make recommendations for addressing underlying issues of institutionalised racism and sexism; transformation; decolonisation and discrimination. It is intended that the analysis of South Africa's TRC in this series – offered by five different speakers from varied perspectives – will provide content for thinking about UCT’s IRTC