“Choreographing Velocity: Contemporary Performance Emerging from the African Continent”

Princeton Humanities Council Belknap Fellow Jay Pather shares some thoughts on contemporary performance emerging from the African continent in conversation with Lewis Center Chair Judith Hamera.

In Writing the World from an African Metropolis, Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall wrote:

The conceptual categories with which to account for social velocity, the power of the unforeseen and of the unfolding, are in need of refinement. So too is the language with which to describe people’s relentless determination to negotiate conditions of turbulence and to introduce order and predictability into their lives.
— (Mbembe and Nuttall, 2008)

Increasingly, social velocity has characterized contemporary societies the world over. African societies also deal with the continued turbulence and the aftershocks of colonialism, from the colonial residue that remains in economies of extraction and structures of modernity and the inter-generational trauma that is visited on bodies and psyches.

These disturbances have also produced some of the world’s most vivid performance artists: searching, passionate, sometimes seeming nihilistic, yet–and in answer to the need for a language to hold this – working deeply with the imperative to give form, shape and articulation to the intangible and the deeply felt. This recalls Martinique philosopher Edouard Glissant’s notion of tremblement (trembling).

Tremblement is neither incertitude nor fear. It is not what paralyzes us. Trembling thinking is the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought…in which we can counter all the systems of terror, domination, and imperialism with the poetics of trembling—it allows us to be in real contact with the world and with the peoples of the world.

In these artists’ unceasing attention to the truth of the representation, simply aesthetically satisfying form and structure are abandoned. In its place, they offer a mixture of unexpected disruption of narrative, deeply subjective opacity and blindingly illuminating image, in Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula’s words, a cocktail of truth and poetry.

Jay Pather’s talk probes some of the underpinnings of such work, reflecting on contemporary artists from Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the Cameroon in this audio visual presentation and open discussion.

Cosponsored by the Department of Art & Archaeology.

Jay Pather is a Belknap Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Lewis Center for the Arts for spring 2026. He is a curator, choreographer, academic, and a professor emeritus at the University of Cape Town where he directed the Institute for Creative Arts. He curates the Infecting the City Public Art Festival and the ICA Live Art Festival in Cape Town, as well as for the Afrovibes Festival in Amsterdam. Publications include Acts of Transgressions, Live Art in South Africa (2019) and Restless Infections, Public Art for a Transforming City (2025). Pather served as juror for the International Award for Public Art and was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government.