“Who are the mythological and hybrid mermaids in our digital and analogue world of contemporary performance narratives?” − a conversation across oceans between two dance makers

abstract

This interview sees South African dance maker Lliane Loots in conversation with German-Chinese choreographer Hannah Ma. They have never met, never embraced body to body – they found each other via the digital synopsis of technology and have begun to share the intimacies of dance-making in, through and via digital realms. Ma’s intensely focused use of technology in her performance-making and performative enquires into what it means to be human in often defined posthuman circumstances, echoes Braidotti’s placement of the posthuman as “a theoretically-powered cartographic tool that aims at achieving adequate understanding of on-going processes of dealing with the human in our fast-changing times” (Braidotti 2019, p. 36). Loots, situated in South Africa, and dealing with her own self-claimed technophobia, and the huge inequity across the digital divide in the South, begins to map – with Ma – the journey women artists might make in an imagined future where performance-making embraces the posthuman that (potentially) allows for hybridity, non-binary representations, and technological intersections with notions of identity.

keywords:

• dance
• performance
• Posthuman
• non-binary
• identity

Notes

1 As of January 2021, there were 38.13 million active internet users in South Africa. Among them, an overwhelming majority (over 36 million) also used mobile internet. During the same period, it was also found that nearly 99% of those using social media accessed their accounts through mobile phones. This is set against the fact that South African has a population of just over 60 million people. See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/685134/south-africa-digital-population/ (accessed 28 September 2021).

2 Women currently hold 19% of tech-related jobs at the top 10 global tech companies in South Africa, relative to men who hold 81%. In leadership positions at these global tech giants, women make up 28%, with men representing 72%. See: https://www.pwc.co.za/en/press-room/changing-gender-perceptions-and-behaviours-in-the-workplace.html (accessed 27 September 2021).

3 Hannah Ma has also indicated, for example, that in Europe there are more and more performance and dance careers made only by a presence in social media and that some festivals are booking artists because of the amount of social media followers they have. She has indicated that there are even festivals that will not book you if you do not have an Instagram account. Ma notes (over the course of our emailed correspondence for this interview) that, “It is a feeling that dancing and performance-making is almost secondary to the social media and digital presence you may or may not have”.

4 See the JOMBA! 2021 programme accessible via: https://jomba.ukzn.ac.za/european-and-usa-crossings/hannahma/#top (accessed 28 September 2021).

5 ‘Reflections on spaces and places in Foucault’s Le corps utopique!’, a synopsis of the radio broadcast: !Le corps utopique!.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lliane Loots

LLIANE LOOTS founded FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY as a professional dance company in 2003 when it grew out of a dance training programme that originally began in 1994. As the artistic director and resident choreographer for FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY, she has won numerous national choreographic awards and has travelled extensively in Europe, America and within the African continent with her dance work. Loots also holds the positions of Lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She completed her PhD in 2018 looking at contemporary dance/performance histories on the African continent. Loots was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government in 2017 for her work (both artistic and curatorial) in the South African dance sector. Email: [email protected]