Colloquium set to enhance the arts

Convenor Jay Pather

Artists, academics, curators and writers will converge on UCT's Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) for the Pre-Post-Per-Form, a colloquium to explore interdisciplinary and performance art.

The event will be the first of its kind in Africa, and takes place from 20 to 22 February on the Hiddingh campus in Cape Town.

Panel discussions, lectures, exhibitions and performances are scheduled throughout the three days. Topics include cities and interdisciplinary performance, visual arts and architecture, literature and visual arts, interdisciplinary arts and the curriculum, creating interdisciplinary and performance art and capturing it on page and film.

Participants will include international luminaries such as the iconic Mexican-American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña; Trevor Davies, director of the Metropolis Biennale; writer and artist Sue Williamson; curator Melissa Mboweni; award-winning architect/visual artist Doung-Anwar Jahangeer; renowned scholar and writer Sarah Nuttal; veteran journalist Adrienne Sichel and performance diva Mwenya Kabwe.

The institute was launched at the end of 2008 to enhance arts within UCT and in the broader community, and to facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary projects. Pre-Post-Per-Form provides a platform to extend those aims.

"Interdisciplinary collaboration and performance art have long and chequered histories," says convener Jay Pather. "Globally, these developments have been anarchic as well as institutional, embracing a paradox inherent in any attempt to formalise a process of breaking boundaries of discipline and transgressing the exclusive rules contained in hermetically sealed forms of expression."