The Inkawu Project: Performing the Animal-Human Relationship in South Africa and Canada

Join us for a staged reading of a play-in-progress about animals, humans, and the histories and experiences we have in common...with puppets! We'll present the latest stage of a collaboration between the JHI, Indigenous-led Punctuate! Theatre, Johannesburg-based collective Noma Yini, and Cape Town-based playwright Buhle Ngaba  with a cast of professional Canadian actors and photos, drawings, and video of the next steps in this international, interarts, interspecies partnership. While you're there, you can catch other performances and talks at the Fresh Ideas in Puppetry Festival co-sponsored by the Toronto School of Puppetry, the Ontario Arts Council, and the JHI.
 
This project excavates kinship that has gone underground. The relationship between humans and monkeys has been marked by centuries of dehumanizing representation: colonial anti-Black racial stereotyping weaponized analogies between humans and monkeys to justify physical and symbolic acts of violence and exclusion. In South Africa, “simianization” discourse is almost literally unspeakable. In many African histories, however, monkeys are cherished gods, protectors, and tricksters, as well as therianthropes, figures of the human becoming animal. They appear in subterranean rock art by the San Indigenous group; for five branches of the Bakgatla nation in northern South Africa and Botswana they are totem animals who embody a “communal essence.” In Yoruba cosmology and transatlantic Black art, the figure of the Signifying Monkey unsettles the meaning that a term conveys by repeating and revising it, punning through words that appear the same but encipher subversive differences. How might the monkey’s example inspire us to re-signify its injurious appropriations? Artists and scholars in South Africa and Canada have begun to explore performance as a means to query, interrupt, and heal racist animal-as-human stereotyping and to start to recover the disavowed bonds between monkeys and humans.
 
Co-Sponsors
Punctuate! Theatre (Edmonton), partner
Noma Yini Arts Collective (Johannesburg, SA), partner
The Toronto School of Puppetry/Fresh Ideas in Puppetry Festival
The Department of English and Drama at UTM