Kim Gurney
--Johannesburg, 06
July 2013--"We
live in a drastically different world. The earth has shifted below our feet. I
hear of and see pictures of protest everywhere ... Many people believe we had
our so-called Spring, the revolution of 1994, and others differ. But we of
course have the soundtrack for our revolution, the protest songs we are very
well known for."
So began South African musician Neo Muyanga's introduction of
a performance with Egyptian troupe El Warsha at
Goethe-Institute on 29 June, as part of the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and
Criticism (JWTC), an annual initiative of WISER at Wits University. The
performance was the end result of an experiment with protest music, past and
present, from their respective countries. The key idea was to discover what elements might be
shared in the popular protest archive of two vastly different musical cultures
and compose protest anew from these commonalities.
The performance to a packed auditorium included solos,
duets, instrumentals and voice and was interspersed with explanatory context.
El Warsha explained how storytelling had become a large part of current protest
in Egypt, from graffiti to poetry, and the group has been collecting
testimonies over the past couple of years, one of which they performed -- the
words of a mother whose son was shot. The evening ended with a rousing
performance of Senzeni Na, a hymn as
Muyanga put it, "that encouraged people to walk much further than they
thought they could".
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| Photo: Kim Gurney |
This collaboration forms part of a broader research project
by Muyanga, housed at the University of the Western Cape, that keys into its
famous Mayibuye archives. Muyanga earlier the same week played audio clips from
this archive and others that also formed part of the performance remix.
He told the audience: "We are concerned this week with
the idea of aesthetics, the idea of beauty, sadness, the idea of the art form
in protest. We are not going to talk about it too much today but we will
perform it for you." And quite so - his words cue a larger challenge in trying
to evoke any artistic performance through a linguistic lens; it has its own
register and impact.
Muyanga is no
stranger to JWTC -- he participated in the 2012 session too and upon reflection
the two projects seem pertinently linked. Last year, he presented in July to a
public audience about his new operetta The
Flower of Shembe, a mythic tale about faith and destiny that is loosely
based on the lives of various messiahs. Muyanga told the audience back then
that imagining a new world was imperative and a revolutionary strategy we must
apply with vigour. He was fascinated by the link music establishes in the
world, alikening notation to a kind of journalistic shorthand. And he spoke
about the operetta storyline, demonstrating the fusion of musical principles on
which it hinged: "It's a story about how difficult it is to love because
we are wired to self-preserve, which is a barrier to love," he said in
question time.
Referring to local political
skirmishes at the time, Muyanga added at last year's session: "I do wonder
whether we need a messiah so our messiah asks this question. The proposal is
perhaps we can be the messiah -- to transcend the self-preservation sense and
to give to the world." Questioned about what kind of leader might be
proposed, Muyanga said: "We have become wired to expect certain talented
erudite individuals to have answers so we give them a mandate. I don't know
what the new proposal is. My thinking is circumscribed by the environment. The
process is trying to find a clearer question that leads to another
paradigm."
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| Photo: Kim Gurney |
Kim
Gurney is a visual artist, independent curator and freelance writer affiliated to University of Cape Town's African Centre for Cities
