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Performance | Oupa Sibeko: 'Black is Blue'

23 – 24 August 2019

The Point of Order, Johannesburg

Oupa Sibeko, Oceanic Humanities for the Global South MA fellow will be performing Black is Blue.


Bottled Seawater: A Sea Inland is an ongoing series of explorations, inquiries, and engagements with the wealth of embodied knowledge surrounding shared cultural practices of bringing bottled seawater inland for health, spiritual and other reasons. It is specifically 'written' through a body-centered method that speaks through Sibeko’s Nguni identity. The research is centered on knowledge systems that come from the people of water, the water based diviners, and the presence of seawater inland in order to stay connected to the world of spirits; the human and ancestral world.


As an extension of this research, Black is Blue becomes a meditation on play. It uses ideas and methodologies of play and performance as ways to reflect on 'improvisation', 'make-believe', and 'staging' as modes of survival, and ways in which people have historically recreated cultures through embodied, reflexive, and collaborative ways.


Photography by Reshma Chhiba.

Oupa Sibeko, Oceanic Humanities for the Global South MA fellow will be performing Black is Blue.


Bottled Seawater: A Sea Inland is an ongoing series of explorations, inquiries, and engagements with the wealth of embodied knowledge surrounding shared cultural practices of bringing bottled seawater inland for health, spiritual and other reasons. It is specifically 'written' through a body-centered method that speaks through Sibeko’s Nguni identity. The research is centered on knowledge systems that come from the people of water, the water based diviners, and the presence of seawater inland in order to stay connected to the world of spirits; the human and ancestral world.


As an extension of this research, Black is Blue becomes a meditation on play. It uses ideas and methodologies of play and performance as ways to reflect on 'improvisation', 'make-believe', and 'staging' as modes of survival, and ways in which people have historically recreated cultures through embodied, reflexive, and collaborative ways.


Photography by Reshma Chhiba.

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