Ketu Katrak: Transforming Society: Jay Pather's Dance-Theater in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Performance, deploying new themes and genres, plays a significant role in social transformation. Jay Pather, a South African artist of Indian origin is an award-winning choreographer, curator, academic, cultural activist, and Artistic Director of the Siwela Sonke Dance Theater Company.
Monday, April 10, 2017
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
10383 Bunche Hall, UCLA
Abstract: Performance, deploying new themes and genres, plays a significant role in social transformation. Jay Pather, a South African artist of Indian origin is an award-winning choreographer, curator, academic, cultural activist, and Artistic Director of the Siwela Sonke Dance Theater Company. Pather regards himself as a South African first (of Indian, Tamil heritage) with a global vision. He describes himself as Indian in heritage and Black in ideology; indeed, he is recognized “as a facilitator of black talent.” He is interested as he notes in an interview, “in the meeting-point of amudhra and a traditional Zulu dance kick, the way the rhythms of say a gumboot dance would flow with kathak [as inAhimsa-Ubuntu].” In this paper, I explore two of Pather’s dance-theater works that engage overtly with Indian themes--Ahimsa Ubuntu (1996), and A South African Siddhartha (1999). However, his politically progressive vision in these and other works, influenced profoundly by apartheid (when Indians occupied an uncomfortable buffer zone between whites and blacks) and its haunting legacy, is rooted in the South African context. Pather aims with his intercultural aesthetic that is uniquely avant-garde, open-ended and hopeful to connect diverse South African audiences and beyond.
Ketu H. Katrak, born in Bombay, India, is Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She was founding Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies (1996-2004) at UCI, and prior to that has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Yale University. Katrak has published in the fields of Drama and Performance, African Drama and Ancient Sanskrit Drama (from India), Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Women Writers and Feminist Theory. She is the author of Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy: A Study of Dramatic Theory and Practice; and of Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World among other co-edited books and essays published in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Asian Studies among others. Katrak's forthcoming book, Contemporary Choreography in Indian Dance: Towards a New Language of Dance in India and the Diaspora will be published by Palgrave/ Macmillan (2011). She is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Award to India (2005-06), a Bunting Institute Fellowship (Harvard/Radcliffe, 1988-89), among other awards. She worked as dramaturg for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's (OSF) production of the Ancient Sanskrit drama, The Clay Cart (2007), and for OSF's Education office for their production of Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's drama, Death and the King's Horseman (2008).
Sponsor(s): Center for India and South Asia