The ICA Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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The ICA Podcast

The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA)

Arts

Frequency: 1 episode/46d. Total Eps: 31

How do Live Artists see, think, listen, respond and create? The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town dives into this question via long-form interviews with South African artists and curators who perform or curate Live Art. Join us on site and in studio as we explore ground-breaking performances, public interventions and participatory installations – and the fascinating minds that bring them into being.

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Apple Podcasts

🇨🇦 Canada - performingArts
01/08/2026
#97
🇨🇦 Canada - performingArts
31/07/2026
#66
🇩🇪 Germany - performingArts
13/07/2026
#98
🇩🇪 Germany - performingArts
12/07/2026
#78
🇩🇪 Germany - performingArts
11/07/2026
#65
🇩🇪 Germany - performingArts
10/07/2026
#54
🇩🇪 Germany - performingArts
09/07/2026
#24
🇨🇦 Canada - performingArts
21/10/2024
#88
🇨🇦 Canada - performingArts
20/10/2024
#58

Spotify

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http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast
17 shares
http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3
16 shares
http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2
16 shares

https://www.instagram.com/urbanvillagemusic
1 share
https://www.instagram.com/marcocasinoph
1 share
https://www.instagram.com/elvissibeko
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https://www.facebook.com/elvis.sibeko
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Score global : 52%

Publication history

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Season 4: Episode 6 - Mbongeni Mtshali

Episode 16

Monday, March 25, 2024 • Duration 33:53

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview African artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works.

Our sixth and final episode of this season features an interview with Mbongeni Mtshali, performance artist, director and head of the Centre for Theatre Dance and Performance Studies at UCT. In the conversation Mtshali goes into great detail about his performances Skin Tight and in(S)kin and details his artistic decisions behind the creation of these works. Mtshali also shares insights in his approach to language, through performance as well through teaching. He talks of languaging in the body, an embodied sense of space, time and subjectivity along with sharing his interests in kinetic and physical theatre

Inspired by Denis Glover's poem The Magpies, Skin Tight tells the fraught, passionate and ultimately enchanting story of a New Zealand couple, Tom and Elizabeth and their lives together, a far jump from his earlier work, in(S)kin, a physical theatre work based on Mtshali’s life. This nimble and robust director expands on this shift in focus, from making rather gentle and revealing work out of one’s own subjective experience, to characters from another country, background and milieu. He also takes us through the provocative and physically demanding physicality in Skin Tight as the two characters share an extreme passion on stage and the means he used to arrive at this. Mtshali speaks about the thread of memory in both of these works; his abiding interest in and deep exploration of physical theatre, the political undertones of his work as well as his love for public art and performance.

Season 4 of the ICA Podcast comprises interviews conducted by Nkgopoleng Moloi and produced by Atiyyah Khan.

This is an initiative created by the Institute for Creative Arts which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you for listening

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Season 4 : Episode 5 - Aika Swai

Episode 15

Monday, March 25, 2024 • Duration 22:13

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview African artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works.

Our fifth episode features an interview with Aika Swai about her performance lecture titled Uncharted Dialog, which she presented at the ICA Scholars showcase last year. In presenting this work she speaks about her approach to what she calls ‘languaging’ in her work and the value of African languages as inherent knowledge. Uncharted Dialog was based on Swai’s dissertation which is centered around an imaginary conversation between American Indian and African language artists and includes speculation of what would happen if the two groups found ways of speaking to each other. In the performance Swai slowly revealed the absence of what may seem like an obvious and potentially powerful conversation, foregrounding the pervasive, deleterious and sometimes invisible traces of ongoing coloniality. In the podcast she talks through her construction of this.

Swai’s research interests extend to themes of translatability, translanguaging and cultural transliteration in African and Caribbean literatures, the communicability of highly subjective experiences (such as the ones tied to race and gender), and the tension between ‘magic’ and ‘real’ when reading African, Caribbean or American First Nations literature through the lens of magical realism.

Season 4 of the ICA Podcast comprises interviews conducted by Nkgopoleng Moloi and produced by Atiyyah Khan.

This is an initiative created by the Institute for Creative Arts which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you for listening.

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S3E03: Qondiswa James

Season 3 · Episode 3

Thursday, November 3, 2022 • Duration 34:30

“We are everywhere is a performative explication of some of the theoretical concepts and how they found themselves as public interventions through last year. It was public interventions, not interventions in school. So it was important to be like, my practice is in the public and a public that goes beyond the institution. And it's also a practice of movement, like marching, that asks of the audience to move together from one place to another place.”

We sit down with cultural worker Qondiswa James to talk through her provocative 2022 performance We are everywhere – comprising a public intervention in Cape Town’s Company’s Garden, a film, and a battle rap by James’s developing alter ego, the tragic clown – which interrogates invisibility through acts of witnessing, reflection and disruption. James invites us to consider socio-political functions of public art interventions and how these can be mobilised towards transgression.

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

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S3E02: Asemahle Ntlonti

Season 3 · Episode 2

Thursday, October 27, 2022 • Duration 35:45

"At the time, when people were talking about the land issue in South Africa, yes, I was for it. But it's only when it hits you personally, that you’re like, okay, how do we then talk about this? And how do I resolve this in my own personal space?... So that's always been an issue. And this investigation in this performance was an investigation of land, at home in the Eastern Cape."

In this second episode of Season 3, visual artist Asemahle Ntlonti takes us through her arresting 2022 performance Between my finger and thumb, which considers how histories are written, and speaks of digging up the past in order to retrieve what has been lost or forgotten. Ntlonti explores the weight of the pen, and the burden of remembering and recording, particularly in relation to land and dispossession.

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

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S3E01: Tandile Mbatsha

Season 3 · Episode 1

Wednesday, October 19, 2022 • Duration 44:20

"I saw this thing that was growing literally on gravel; this flower that had popped on gravel. It was the most gorgeous thing… And I use that metaphor, or that image of that seed growing on rugged [land], arid sometimes, but specifically concrete, and I kept on thinking about that. And I'm like, well, isn't this what we're doing as queer people and femme people, women in this country? Isn't this what we’re doing every day, when we dare to live?"

Join us as we journey with performance artist, activist and educator Tandile Mbatsha through their performance I AM, which premiered at the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Mbatsha invites us to reflect on queer histories and survival in a work permeated with deeply personal recollections, and captivating sounds and movement.

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

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S3: Introduction

Episode 10

Thursday, October 13, 2022 • Duration 09:47

Welcome to Season 3 of The ICA Podcast!

In this Season – hosted by writer Nkgopoleng Moloi – each episode explores a performance featured at the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Join us over the next 7 episodes as each artist brings their performance to life, and reflects along the way on how their upbringing has shaped their practice. We'll be diving into:

I AM by Tandile Mbatsha;
Between my finger and thumb by Asemahle Ntlonti;
We are everywhere by Qondiswa James;
Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud by Russel Hlongwane;
Ingoduko yamaNkazana (The Return of the Home of Harlots) by Lukhanyiso Skosana;
UkuNqula kukuThandaza by Nkosenathi Koela; and
Reclaiming the Poetics of Indigenous Horns by Kolawole Gbolahan.

In this introductory episode, get a sneak peek at what lies ahead!

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

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S2E08: Jay Pather

Season 2 · Episode 8

Saturday, October 1, 2022 • Duration 59:17

“The body remembers more than through the head. Nerve and vessel, artery and synapse, all carry information from point to point, suffusing muscle, bone and cell with a plethora of image and sound, a flicker of light, a scream or a touch. Sometimes we wish that a delete button might annihilate some of this information. But the body instead stores relentlessly, file upon file, bottomless cabinets of memory, individual and collective…”

In this final episode of Season 2 of The ICA Podcast, academic, curator, choreographer and director of the ICA, Jay Pather, draws us into his visceral and haunting 2008 work, Body of Evidence – the intricate workshop process from which it emerged, and the work’s grappling with precarity, memory, the inexpressibility of pain, and the long aftereffects of trauma lodged in the body – for the individual and for the nation.

This marks the end of Season 2, but Season 3 is just days away! Join the ICA for the public launch of Season 3 at 18.00 on Friday 7 October 2022 in Cape Town! BOOK YOUR FREE TICKETS TO THE S3 LAUNCH EVENT HERE: www.qkt.io/ICAPodcastS3Launch

Music and sounds in this episode are from Jay Pather’s Body of Evidence performed at the Durban Playhouse in 2009 by Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, and sound designed by James Webb.

Books referenced in this episode are: Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa by Ketu H. Katrak; and Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice by Catherine M. Cole.

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

S2E07: nomi blum

Season 2 · Episode 7

Tuesday, June 14, 2022 • Duration 38:38

“When my grandmother died, I thought about all the stories that she took with her in the ground, and I thought a lot about how, in Romania, you have so many people having such interesting memories and interesting pasts that are not archived… And I started to record things because I talk a lot with people – I think that's what makes me happiest, you know, to encounter people and learn from them and exchange things.”

Romanian interdisciplinary artist nomi blum invites us into the experimental performance space, and rich written and aural archive of Fragments of Encounters – an immersive installation, first performed at the Infecting the City public art festival in 2019, that emerged out of blum’s everyday encounters and conversations with people of different ages, backgrounds, nationalities and languages.

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

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S2E06: Athi-Patra Ruga

Season 2 · Episode 6

Friday, May 6, 2022 • Duration 39:47

“Post 1994, it felt like you were being made part of a body national, and there was something slightly and softly violent about it... Utopia, balloons, zebras, multi colours – all of those things, for me, were used to be a very dark critique of the utopia that we thought we built in South Africa for ourselves. The one that we burn people for.”

Performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga takes us on an immersive journey through the sights, sounds and movement of his epic retrospective work, Things We Lost in the Rainbow. Performed at the 2018 ICA Live Art Festival curated by Jay Pather, Things We Lost in the Rainbow unfolded as a two-hour long multi-sited, multi-media procession in which a cast of over 30 avatars led the audience through Cape Town’s city centre, from the digital dome of the Planetarium to the walls of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God on Buitenkant Street.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions, and additional sounds and music are from Athi-Patra Ruga's video works Over the Rainbow and Public Service Announcement.

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

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S2E05: Gavin Krastin

Season 2 · Episode 5

Tuesday, February 22, 2022 • Duration 34:42

“I just knew that I wanted the audience to be the catalyst, or driver, of the action. I don't know if it's from a particular type of training in theatre, but there's always so much pressure to do, and to fill the space with actions and sounds and whatever. And we find the audience doing the complete opposite. They're just like, sitting there quite still and quietly. And I knew I wanted to kind of flip that around.”

Winner of the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art, Gavin Krastin, invites us into the intimate Bindery theatre to re-experience his visceral and spectacular 2018 participatory performance Yet to be Determined – a haunting meditation on vulnerability, connection, pain, personhood and transformation.

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

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The ICA Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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The ICA Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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