Repatriation Rhythms, Cape Town W/Chandra Frank

REPATRIATION RHYTHMS (Cape Town, South Africa)
a collaborative performance curated by Chandra Frank

Curated by Chandra Frank, and presented in collaboration with the Iziko South African National Gallery, Repatriation Rhythms is a collaborative performance event in which queer intimacy, touch and the exchange of bodies of thought and text are explored in relation to sound, music and movement. 
 
Including a sonic landscape created by LA-based DJ Lynnée Denise and an improvised dance work by Zanele Siko-Radu, the performance will be accompanied by a projection of African diasporic dance, embodied by Black American dancers from the early 1900s to 2000s. Bringing these elements together, Repatriation Rhythms is inspired by the cultural exchange between Black South Africa and Black America, and the political implications of the relationship between the US and South African governments in upholding the social engineering that produced apartheid and its living legacies. Inserting a queer kinship model, and seeking to rewrite (or perform) voices and bodies missing from revisionist histories, the piece forwards a speculative archive rooted in the exchange of solidarity work.

DJ Scholarship with Lynnée Denise in Jo'burg for Black Portraitures III

Lynnée Denise was invited to share her work on DJ Culture and house music by scholar and futurist Ruha Benjamin of Princeton University. Her main argument was that DJs, alongside musicologists and cultural theorists, literary scholars and historians, are among those best equipped to decode and unlock messages found in the hidden transcripts of black musical products. And that they should therefore be consulted and included in the production of black music scholarship. The panel, Pan African Futures: Exploring Race as Technology, Afrofuturism as Methodology, featured world renown academic scholar Achille Mbembe on the subject of Afropolitanism, and Ingrid Lafleur on AFROTOPIA: Detroit Afrikan Futures as Resistance.