Welcome to NEXT FEST, the University of Pretoria’s festival of postgraduate theatre and performance. Showcasing the creative research of Honours students in the School of the Arts – Drama, the festival brings together performance-making, experimentation and critical inquiry, offering audiences an opportunity to encounter emerging artistic practices as they take shape.

The works presented in this programme emerge from the Honours Physical Theatre module, which explores the relationship between embodied practice, artistic research and performance composition. At this level of study, students are encouraged to approach the body as a site of thinking and knowledge-making, using movement, sensation and creative experimentation to investigate questions that matter to them.

Over the course of the semester, each student developed an individual research project initiated through an encounter between their body and an object of their choosing. This initial investigation was then extended through collaboration with another performer, opening up new possibilities for exploring the relationships between bodies, objects, movement and space. The resulting performances bring together these encounters with elements of scenography, sound and light to develop distinctive movement languages and performance compositions. Each work reflects an ongoing process of embodied inquiry, in which making a performance becomes a means of asking questions, testing ideas and discovering new ways of thinking.

We extend our sincere thanks to our external examiner, Mr Kamogelo Molobye from the University of the Witwatersrand, for his time, expertise and engagement with the students’ work and research.

Thank you for joining us at NEXT FEST and for supporting the creative and scholarly journeys of our postgraduate performers.

Presented works this week:

Creator:

Prayer Shwala

Supervisor:

 Dr Alan Parker

Cast:

 Prayer Shwala & Khululekani Khoza

Posession:

Who Holds Whom?Think of something you have held for so long that you can no longer say whether your hand is closed around it or it is closed around your hand. Think of the voice you obey without remembering when you first agreed to it. We are always carrying something, and we are always being carried. Before you watch, you might ask yourself: what has a hold on you, and what did it promise in return? 

Presented works this week:

Creator:

Sazikazi Ndabula

Supervisor:

 Dr Alan Parker

Performed by:

 Sazikazi Ndabula & Lesolomzi Soqaka

Static:

Static is a piece of physical movement that explores the curiosity and collaboration of the umbrella. The work asks how an umbrella can be explored outside its innate protective function, turning instead to its sonic quality, the way its sound resemble television static or rainfall static. Through choreography-as-research, embodied research, and improvisation, the piece holds the umbrella as the threshold object, with the ritual of opening and closing as a possible thread.