“Who are the mythological and hybrid mermaids in our digital and analogue world of contemporary performance narratives?” − a conversation across oceans between two dance makers

Abstract

abstract This interview sees South African dance maker Lliane Loots in conversation with German-Chinese choreographer Hannah Ma. They have never met, never embraced body to body – they found each other via the digital synopsis of technology and have begun to share the intimacies of dance-making in, through and via digital realms. Ma’s intensely focused use of technology in her performance-making and performative enquires into what it means to be human in often defined posthuman circumstances, echoes Braidotti’s placement of the posthuman as “a theoretically-powered cartographic tool that aims at achieving adequate understanding of on-going processes of dealing with the human in our fast-changing times” (Braidotti 2019, p. 36). Loots, situated in South Africa, and dealing with her own self-claimed technophobia, and the huge inequity across the digital divide in the South, begins to map – with Ma – the journey women artists might make in an imagined future where performance-making embraces the posthuman that (potentially) allows for hybridity, non-binary representations, and technological intersections with notions of identity.