JAY PATHER, PERFORMANCE, AND SPATIAL POLITICS IN SOUTH AFRICA

397pp., illus., paperback, Bloomington, 2021

Monograph on South African choreographer, theater director, curator, and creative artist Jay Pather. Pather is Director of Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre and Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town.

"Introducing us to the innovative work of Jay Pather, choreographer, theater director and curator, who believes that spaces carry history, Professor Ketu Katrak delves into the geographic, bodily, social and psychic space of post-apartheid South Africa, and the history of trauma it carries. South Africa with its race politics is a metaphor of the modern world. The book and the work of Jay Pather should echo in our hearts." Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, and author of Decolonizing the Mind

"During and post-apartheid as an activist artist and aesthetic provocateur par excellence, Jay Pather and his ground-breaking art-making have played a seminal role in simultaneously educating, entertaining, informing and conscientizing diverse communities and audiences about key issues such as human rights and gender politics. As Ketu Katrak's incisive book reflects, his artmaking and academic practice ingeniously blur boundaries between theatre dance/dance theatre/performance art/ live art with ingenuity and inspirational creativity." Adrienne Sichel, author of Body Politics: Fingerprinting South African contemporary dance

Ketu H. Katrak is Professor in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of Contemporary Indian Dance: New creative choreography in India and the Diaspora; Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial women writers of the Third World, and Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy: A study of dramatic theory and practice.