Biography
Dr Sara Matchett is an award-winning theatre director and Associate Professor at the Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies (CTDPS) at the University of Cape Town. Her teaching spans acting, voice, performance making, applied theatre and performance analysis, grounded in a transdisciplinary approach to creative practice. Her research explores the intersections of performance, embodiment, breath, voice, grief, ecological consciousness, wellbeing, social justice and sustainability. Through collaborative and practice-as-research methodologies, she investigates how embodied artistic practices cultivate relationality, resilience and presence, and how creative processes can foster more ethical and interconnected ways of being in the world. Sara is co-founder and Artistic Director of The Mothertongue Project, a women’s arts collective through which she has worked extensively as a performance-maker, performer, director, and facilitator. She is also a Lead Trainer of Fitzmaurice Voicework®, African Regional Coordinator for the Fitzmaurice Institute, and an Advanced Breathwork Practitioner and Trainer with Breathwork Africa. Her professional practice integrates voice, breath, and embodied awareness across artistic and educational contexts.
Lamentation at the Liesbeek: IX — Ritual, Resistance, Reclamation
is a 9-minute immersive sonic and visual poem that invites audiences into an embodied encounter with a contested river landscape in Cape Town, South Africa. Originally conceived by internationally recognized voice and performance scholars Micha Espinosa and Sara Matchett, the work is rooted in ritual, ancestral memory, and contemporary struggle, transforming sound, image, and testimony into a shared act of witnessing. Rather than functioning as a traditional documentary, the immersive work operates as a poetic intervention. Spatialized sound, multi-screen imagery, and ritual gesture converge to create a sensorial environment in which history is not explained but felt. The piece emerges from a lamentation ritual performed at the confluence of the Liesbeek and Black Rivers—an area of profound spiritual, ecological, and political significance for the Khoi and San, First Nations peoples of South Africa.
Synopsis
The lament itself functioned as a form of sonic activism. Through voice, breath, rhythm, and collective sounding, the ritual activated the site as a space of resistance—using sound to interrupt silence, to call attention to ongoing colonial violence, and to reassert Indigenous presence. Rather than protest through spectacle, the lament operated through resonance, invoking grief as political force and listening as civic action.
