S2E08: Jay Pather

The ICA Podcast

“The body remembers more than through the head. Nerve and vessel, artery and synapse, all carry information from point to point, suffusing muscle, bone and cell with a plethora of image and sound, a flicker of light, a scream or a touch. Sometimes we wish that a delete button might annihilate some of this information. But the body instead stores relentlessly, file upon file, bottomless cabinets of memory, individual and collective…”

In this final episode of Season 2 of The ICA Podcast, academic, curator, choreographer and director of the ICA, Jay Pather, draws us into his visceral and haunting 2008 work, Body of Evidence – the intricate workshop process from which it emerged, and the work’s grappling with precarity, memory, the inexpressibility of pain, and the long aftereffects of trauma lodged in the body – for the individual and for the nation.

This marks the end of Season 2, but Season 3 is just days away! Join the ICA for the public launch of Season 3 at 18.00 on Friday 7 October 2022 in Cape Town! BOOK YOUR FREE TICKETS TO THE S3 LAUNCH EVENT HERE: www.qkt.io/ICAPodcastS3Launch

Music and sounds in this episode are from Jay Pather’s Body of Evidence performed at the Durban Playhouse in 2009 by Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, and sound designed by James Webb.

Books referenced in this episode are: Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa by Ketu H. Katrak; and Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice by Catherine M. Cole.

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.