PERFORMANCE

Nomcebisi Moyikwa’s performance title NO.HUMANS.INVOLVED. is influenced by the title No Humans Involved. An Open Letter to My Colleagues by writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter. Written as a reaction to the Los Angeles riots in 1992, the letter examined the way in which dominant knowledge systems excluded some people from being counted as human.

Using insistent stuttering, contortions, and mutilated agitation, N.H.I  is a transdisciplinary response, if not a reaction/an action followed by wells of silences and detailed blank shots and stillness to the following question: “What does it mean to experiment with living in a context of a world that is uninhabitable”? (Saidiya Hartman) N.H.I will be taking methodological storytelling cues from afro surrealism to ask questions on Being and blackness. Motivated by the necessity of deliberately unsettling normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.

Choreographer, director: Nomcebisi Moyikwa in collaboration with the cast

Narratives by: Nomcebisi Moyikwa, Qhawe Vumase, Mlondiwethu Dubazane

Set designer, costume, script: Nomcebisi Moyikwa

Performers: Nomcebisi Moyikwa, Qhawe Vumase, Mlondiwethu Dubazane, Toby Ngomane

Composition: Joshua Biggs

Featured sonics: Alice Coltrane, Nina Simone, Solange Knowles, Busi Mhlongo, Brenda Fassie

Production manager: Toby Ngomane