On the 28th of January 2023, Race:Gender:Class and the Practicing Refusal Collective presented a curated offering of sonic, performative and poetic responses, as part of the Joburg convening of Think from Black: a Lexicon. Hosted by the Johannesburg Art Gallery and @occupation.jag, the programme featured readings and art activations by Canisia Lubrin, Gabrielle Goliath, Danai Mupotsa, Christina Sharpe and Nelisiwe Xaba.

Please note: this is a 5-minute preview video. The full video was made available as a 1-week screening window, courtesy of the artist.

Nelisiwe Xaba, Fremde Tänze

In the spring of 2014, Nelisiwe Xaba, was invited to the Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum at the Freiburg Theater, amidst the Black Forest in Southern Germany. During her residency, Nelisiwe Xaba created a dance evening based on the programs of female dancers such as Mary Wigman and Sent M’Ahesa. These pioneers of Modern Dance in the 1910s and 1920s often presented a series of short pieces accompanied by music. In one evening, they journeyed between distant places and times, or rather their imagination of them: a “Temple Dance” was followed by an “Indian Dance”, an “Arabesque” or a “Siamese Dance”. In her evening of ‘foreign dances’, Xaba rotates the perspective and exoticizes the Black Forest.

Nelisiwe Xaba received a scholarship to study at the Johannesburg Dance Foundation, as well as the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London. Returning to South Africa in 1997, she joined Pact Dance Company and later launched her solo career, and began working with a variety of esteemed choreographers, including Robyn Orlin. Her work is informed largely by her feminist and racial politics which challenge stereotypes of the black female body and mainstream notions of gender. She has been involved in various multimedia projects, collaborating with visual artists, fashion designers, theatre and television directors and poets and musicians. Her seminal works such as “Plasticization” and “They Look At Me & That’s All They Think” have toured internationally over the last few years. In 2013, Neli performed “The Venus” in Venice as part of Imaginary Fact – Contemporary South African Art and the Archive at the South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the same year, the film version of her acclaimed performance piece “Uncles & Angels”, a collaboration with Mocke J Van Veuren, was awarded the FNB Art Prize. In 2016 she created “Urban Mermaid” which was performed at the Goodman Gallery 50th Anniversary and at Berliner Festspiele. In 2017, she presented “Bang Bang Wo” at the Centre for the Less Good Idea, with funding from National Arts Council. The collaboration “Hominal/Xaba” with Marie-Caroline Hominal, a Swiss dancer and choreographer, premiered in 2019. Her latest piece is a sound installation “Nzinga” for the 2020 Virtual National Arts Festival.

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‘Think from Black: a Lexicon’ is imagined as a collective effort to create a more expansive conceptual vocabulary that takes Black life - in all of its diversity and multiplicity - as its point of departure.

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