Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to announce the publication of a special “audio walk” edition of GPS: Global Performance Studies at https://gps.psi-web.org/ , with audio elements also available for your phones at https://globalperformancestudies.bandcamp.com/album/uhambo-sonic-wanderings and https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/uhambo-sonic-wanderings/id1857929679
Uhambo: Sonic Wanderings, edited by Neka Da Costa and Kamogelo Molobye, extends the theme of Performance Studies international’s 2023 conference at Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg, South Africa. The phrase “Uhambo Luyazilawula,” which roughly translates to “the journey guides itself” or “the journey follows its own rules,” captured an ethos of emergent, embodied, and nonlinear knowledge creation. The conference positioned Uhambo Luyazilawula as both a theoretical and practical framework for Performance Studies, emphasising creative, arts-based research and viewing the body as a site of epistemological inquiry. By embracing the unpredictability and agency of the journey, this approach challenged strict methodological norms, inviting new imaginings for performance scholarship and practice within African and broader Global South contexts.
This issue of Global Performance Studies is a continuation of the conversations we began in Johannesburg. Uhambo was our invitation for attendees to surrender to journeys that connect us, and to explore ways of understanding and critiquing how we came to be through praxis and reflection. Here, we extend that invitation to you, our readers and listeners, as you journey through the projects in this collection, which combine audio, text, image, and video in ways that interrogate and invite different positionalities and epistemological frameworks.
Contents
Introduction
Uhambo: Translating Embodied Wanderings into Performance Practices and Epistemologies through Audio/Multimedia Walks
Neka Da Costa, Kamogelo Molobye
Listen: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/220/178
Articles
Sonic Kumema Poetic Uhambo: An experimental sonic and poetry readings in short chants as an autoethnographic embodied wanderings translating part of the authors reflections while living in the diaspora
Traver Mudzonga
Listen: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/124/174
Walking in the Woods
Annette Arlander
Watch: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/122/155
Memory, Sound, and Orality: Re-inhabiting the Island of Vallay
Arun Sood
Listen: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/125/156
Combat Breathing Mixtape: A Meditation, Lament, and Performance
Refiloe Lepere
Listen: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/164/154
“It was the slave that actually pushed the sea back”: An experimental analysis of a previously-incarcerated group’s walking history tour to the Castle of Good Hope through found poetry and sonic sampling
Javier Perez
Read/Listen: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/130/159
Improvised Access: Listening for African Migrants’ Journeys through an Abu Dhabi Public Park
Nurhidayat et al. (Abu Dhabi Public Spaces Collective)
Listen: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/131/179
Dirty Walks
Bettina Malcomess, Myer Taub
Read: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/163/157
Desired Paths, Required Movement: A Guide to Traveling With Chronic Illness in This Place
Anne E. Stoner
Listen: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/128/173
Invasibility, Movement, and Agency: Exploring Plant-Human Relationships in the Plantationocene
Joanne Scott
Listen: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/119/160
A Letter Last: When I’m calling you-ou-ou-ooooooooooo
Julieanna Preston
Read/Listen: https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/126/161
with best wishes
Theron, on behalf of GPS
Theron Schmidt