Collaborative Conversations: Celebrating Twenty-One Years of the Mothertongue Project Eds. Alex Halligey and Sara Matchett

Abstract

Reviewed by: Collaborative Conversations: Celebrating Twenty-One Years of the Mothertongue Project ed. by Alex Halligey and Sara Matchett Loren Kruger Collaborative Conversations: Celebrating Twenty-One Years of the Mothertongue Project EDS. ALEX HALLIGEY AND SARA MATCHETT Modjaji Books, 2021. 255 pp. ISBN 9781928433163 paper. Promulgated in 1996, South Africa's democratic constitution is distinguished by its inclusion of social rights, including housing, healthcare, and environmental protection—in sum, its defense of well-being—alongside individual rights to equality before the law, regardless of ethnic affiliation, gender, or sexual orientation. Less well-known, but also introduced in 1996, the first democratic White Paper on Arts and Culture extended the remit for well-being to include access to and participation in the arts as a fundamental prerequisite for democracy. Together, these documents have inspired a generation of practitioners who combine art and activism, care and creation, dramaturgy and democratic participation. They argue that this embodied synthesis of work and play has the power to sustain, heal, and delight South Africans, even under conditions of endemic poverty, violence against women, gender minorities, and children and economic and other forms of inequity. The Mothertongue Project (MTP) is not the only organization that has responded to the constitutional aspiration to well-being, but it is unusual in that it was founded by women. While MTP's current associates include men, it has consistently focused on the performance and representation—in social as well as artistic realms—of women, or womxn, which some collaborators prefer as a way to include gender-queer people who identify with women, and all who, despite the gender equity mandated by the constitution, remain subject to patriarchal violence. Despite having to tackle formidable obstacles, the MTP has much to celebrate after twenty-one years of working to knit together the frayed connections between performance art and social activism. True to the organization's practice across the divisions marked by the terms mentioned above, this book offers "collaborative conversations" that honor different kinds of formal and informal expertise and lived experience in embodied practices of creation and care [End Page 188] in what MTP cofounder Sara Matchett calls "curating care" (180). In the spirit of collaboration, each chapter begins with excerpts of conversations that took place during the workshops that shaped this book. They are accompanied by vivid color photographs of key performances, equally colorful drawings that represent work in progress, or key themes such as the practices of healing psychological and physical wounds. The first and last performances that receive detailed attention in the book are avowedly artistic pieces by MTP cofounder Rehane Abrahams, which have played at international festivals and speak to texts and themes familiar to readers around the world. In addition to training at the University of Cape Town, Abrahams draws on family history as the descendant in part of KhoeSan, the portmanteau name identifying South Africa's first peoples, and in part of South Asian Muslims enslaved by the Dutch East India Company. What the Water Gave Me (2000) explored the role of mothers as keepers of family lore as well as the feminine forces associated with water in India and Africa. Although the piece was initially called Mothertongue to acknowledge the loss of native languages suffered by enslaved people and their creation of new languages such as Afrikaans, Mothertongue later came to name the organization that emerged from this first of many collaborations. In her most recent work discussed in the book, Womb of Fire, created for the 2018 International Festival of Theatre in Kerala (South India), Abrahams wove family history into a reinterpretation of the womb of fire that birthed Draupadi in the North Indian epic Mahabharatha and, by extension of the violence that has accompanied black and brown women in South Africa, figured in performance by Groot Katrien, an enslaved woman brought to the Cape in the seventeenth century from Dutch "possession" Batavia. Although Abrahams and Matchett might have addressed the friction between this epic of North Indian dominance and stories such as the Ramayana that capture the South Indian and Indonesian origins of many enslaved people at the Cape, and speak to the context of performance in Kerala, their dialogue and accompanying...