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.
Sven Ortel is a projection and experience designer whose work has shaped the use of digital imagery in live performance. Since 2000, he has explored how projection, video, and emerging technologies deepen storytelling and create immersive, audience-centered experiences.
Originally from Cologne, Germany, he studied lighting design in London and began his career with productions at the National Theatre, West End, and Royal Court Theatre. Notable credits include Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure and his first Broadway show, Jumpers (2004).
He continues to explore how media builds cohesive visual worlds and expands the possibilities of live experiences.
He is Professor of Practice in Immersive and Entertainment Design at Arizona State University and has worked in higher education for over a decade.
Outside work, he enjoys land restoration, camping, running, hiking, and mountain biking. More at svenortel.com and LinkedIn.
Rodrigo Meirelles is a sound artist, educator, and researcher working across immersive audio, spatial storytelling, cinema, and sound installation. He is an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University’s Sidney Poitier New American Film School and Director of the Sonora Immersive Audio Lab at ASU’s Media and Immersive eXperience Center. His creative and scholarly practice explores how sonic environments shape perception, embodied experience, cultural memory, and our relationships with place. Before joining ASU, Rodrigo spent a decade at Globo Studios in Brazil, where he led sound teams and helped introduce immersive audio technologies and workflows across award-winning film and broadcast productions. His work has been presented through exhibitions, publications, conferences, and collaborative projects in the United States, Brazil, Europe, and South Africa. He is committed to transdisciplinary practice, student mentorship, community engagement, and expanding access to emerging audio technologies, particularly through collaborations that center diverse voices, histories, and ways of listening.
Micha Espinosa is an internationally recognized voice specialist, teaching artist, and activist celebrated for her work in culturally inclusive pedagogies and liberation practices. A professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison, Espinosa has taught extensively across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, training hundreds of teachers in Fitzmaurice Voicework. She is the inaugural Artistic Director of the Fitzmaurice Voice Institute and a prolific speaker who has shared her expertise at international conferences and on renowned podcasts like Folger Shakespeare, In a Manner of Speaking, and Theatre of Others, among others. An award-winning editor, Espinosa has published influential resources, including Monologues for Latino Actors: A Resource Guide to Contemporary Latino/a Playwrights, Scenes for Latinx Actors, and Latinx Actor Training, advancing the field of actor education.
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.
