Chant for Disinheriting Apartheid
A performance lecture by Nhanhla Mahlangu
VIAD's RADICAL | OTHERS hosts a journey through the art archive of Nhlanhla Mahlangu's work from 1994-2024. The journey traces 30 years of democracy in South Africa by visualising 30 years of Mahlangu’s compositions. This one-night-only performance lecture titled Chant for Disinheriting Apartheid sees Mahlangu traveling into different visual and sonic spaces to reframe his work.
Mahlangu’s sonic invocations, which he significantly names ‘chants’, are mantras that move audiences and performers beyond the real. He works with voice like a dance with the intangible. He takes the sonic warfare borne in apartheid and casts it out of performers’ bodies, spelling healing with the scripts of trauma. Mahlangu calls himself a ‘bad prophet’, someone who has not trained in the ways of listening to spirits, and yet scavenges the air for songs and cleanses bodies of pollutants.
The artist will play through the format of a performance lecture. The hybrid performance traces a library of sounds that live in the body. Searching for “the sound of the whole world”, Mahlangu says he began developing this library of sounds as a child who grew up during apartheid, learning to listen as a way of learning his surroundings. In this performance lecture, Mahlangu listens back to his oeuvre of unconventional compositions. He connects these to an architectural sense of seeing the body as a hall of memories - with some memories needing to be aired out of the crevices of black bodies.
In this event, Mahlangu explores the achievements and ongoing challenges of the past three decades of democracy through three decades of his work in sonic composition. Mahlangu brings a unique mode of artmaking to conversations of democracy and freedom that moves between past, present and future to release somatic memory in ways described by poets who have known exile. Flowers spring forth from Mahlangu’s work with sonic trauma.
This performance is part of Nhlanhla Mahlangu’s ongoing research in practice. Seeding ideas were incubated on residency with the Centre for the Less Good Idea and shared at THE OPEN MOMENT: SHADOWS, STEPS & SONGS as well as the Centre Outside the Centre workshops hosted by the Miami Light Project in Collaboration with the Centre for the Less Good Idea. The performance lecture is directed by Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga and Nhlanhla Mahlangu.
Nhanhla Mahlangu
Director of Song and Dance Works, Nhlanhla Mahlangu is a graduate in Theory and Practice of Dance Teaching from Moving into Dance Mophatong. He has almost 30 years of professional performance and administration in Theatre, Dance, Dance Theatre, and Dance Education. Mahlangu has made great strides in the performing arts industry as a choreographer, actor, singer, poet, dancer, teacher, administrator and composer. Mahlangu is a self-titled Body Orchestrator and has worked with the Soweto Gospel Choir and the Vuyani Dance Theatre company, in one of many touring compositions, like Cion: Requiem of Ravel's Bolero. About his collaborations with the Centre for the Less Good Idea, Mahlangu says, “My practice has helped the Centre to define the way it operates. I have been working with the Centre for the Less Good Idea since it started in 2017, collaborating with different artists, performing, composing and directing a number of works. I have created new works there and presented CHANT, a seminal piece to my body of work, with the Centre when I was a co-curator for Season 2. I also created Enyangeni-Those Who Dare to Chant and Qubula-A Deep Red Chant in partnership with the Centre.” Away from the centre Mahlangu became William Kentridge’s main collaborator - composing for Waiting for the Sibyl and The Great YES and Great NO, amongst other collaborations.
Mahlangu has an ongoing series of performances he calls, ‘Chants’. In The Worker's CHANT, he worked with long-term collaborators Phuphuma Love Minus. The group sings Isicathamiya - a form of song and dance historically created from the hushed chant of workers. This form of music has helped Mahlangu to think through song as a spasm born from crisis. Mahlangu works with documenting stories through echoing compositions. His archival practice is an assembly of the practices of sonic freedom in the African Black Radical tradition.
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