Towards a deeper collaborative curatorial practice: On the challenges of presenting indigenous performance at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the curating of live performance, specifically on the performance of musical indigeneity as it has played out at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa since the formal transition from apartheid. I highlight the extent to which indigenous musics of the Eastern Cape have tended to be curated as visual spectacles rather than serving as culturally informed music showcases. This underscores the extent to which the performance of what is colloquially referred to as “indigenous traditional music” continues to map onto reductive and divisive apartheid-era notions of ethnicity and “race”. I argue that if transformative agendas are meaningfully to affect curatorial initiatives, and vice versa, particularly in the public domain, we are challenged to afford sustained attention to the poetics and politics of cultural display. In the relative absence of academic programmes or research projects that significantly foreground the curating of live musical performance as a mode of academic practice and inquiry, I advocate for critical engagement with such questions, and advance a conversation between visual and performance studies, arguing that considerable scope exists for the curation of live performance to become a valid field of applied study and practice in South Africa.