HOW PERFORMANCE THEORY HELPS US UNDERSTAND MORE ABOUT ROCK ART
By:
Dr David Witelson
Date:
Thu, 07/03/2024 - 19:30 to 20:30
Venue:
The Auditorium, Roedean School, 35 Princess of Wales Terrace, Parktown, Johannesburg
Branch:
Northern
HOW PERFORMANCE THEORY HELPS US UNDERSTAND MORE ABOUT ROCK ART
By: Dr David Witelson
Date: Thursday, 07 March 2024 Time: 19:30
Venue: The Auditorium, Roedean School,
35 Princess of Wales Terrace, Parktown, Johannesburg
Charge: Non-members: R50, members: free
Southern Africa’s San (Bushman) rock art is some of the best understood globally. In this region, rich ethnographic records combine with highly detailed images and sophisticated social theory to reveal how the indigenous image-makers thought and lived. The enormous advances in the shamanistic interpretation of the art since the 1970s are well known, but more recent research has focused on the close relationships between the different forms of San expressive culture observed by anthropologists, such as trance dances and storytelling, to better understand more about now unobservable rock art practices. These performances brought meaningful concepts into being.
Southern Africa’s San (Bushman) rock art is some of the best understood globally. In this region, rich ethnographic records combine with highly detailed images and sophisticated social theory to reveal how the indigenous image-makers thought and lived. The enormous advances in the shamanistic interpretation of the art since the 1970s are well known, but more recent research has focused on the close relationships between the different forms of San expressive culture observed by anthropologists, such as trance dances and storytelling, to better understand more about now unobservable rock art practices. These performances brought meaningful concepts into being.
In this talk, Dr Witelson will present his new book, Theatres of Imagery: A Performance Theory Approach to Rock Art Research, in which he uses rock paintings from the Eastern Cape’s Stormberg mountains to understand some of the interactions between image-making ‘performers’ and their ‘audiences’ on which society itself was contingent.
Dr David Witelson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Rock Art Research Institute. His research interests include the Later Stone Age hunter-gatherer rock arts of southern Africa and the performative practices they involved. He works closely with the rock art itself as well as ethnographic and historical evidence to study the social contexts in which the making and viewing of images was socially significant in the pre-colonial past.