The Drowning Eye is a little-known play by Frantz Fanon, written in 1949. Part love poem, part surrealist narrative, and part philosophical treatise, Fanon’s play reads as a testimony to the power and possibilities of love as an act of resistance.
This contemporary reimagining of the text explores the edge between love, shadow and violence. Tamara Guhrs and Stacy Hardy join forces with KwaSha, the Market Theatre Lab and Windybrow Arts Centre and academic partners at the University of Chicago to present this work at a time when Fanon’s writing has a new relevance for a generation of young South Africans questioning the limits and possibilities of revolution today.
The Drowning Eye is performed in the midst of the exhibition, Revolutionary Love, (see p.) and is part of a broader project that seeks to explore the role of historical loves within revolutionary movements.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Conceptualised by Stacy Hardy and Tamara Guhrs
Directed & designed by Tamara Guhrs
Dramaturgy: Stacy Hardy and Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Performed by KwaSha Theatre Company in association with the Market Theatre Laboratory and the Windybrow Arts Centre.
Performers: Moagi Kai, Mongezi Ntukwana, Damien Wantenaar, Nonhlanhla Sidiki, Sivuyise Kibido.
Sound design and music: Tumi Mogorosi
Voice: Lesego Rampolokeng
‘The School of Revolutionary Love’ is a collaboration between Flying House, Windybrow Arts Centre, The Market Lab, with funding from the French Institute South Africa and Mazarz. Support from the Neubauer Collegium For Culture & Society, University of Chicago, has contributed to the curation of the research exhibition.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
In 1992 Stacy Hardy and Tamara Guhrs founded Venus Fly Trapeze, a feminist/ LGBTQIA theatre company which produced more than 10 original productions throughout the 1990s until Hardy and Guhrs began to pursue their own individual careers.
Hardy worked largely as a writer and an Associate Editor at the pan-African journal Chimurenga, together with whom she has presented research driven installations at Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018), Art X Lagos (2017), Raw Academy, Dakar, l (2017), Performa 2015, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2014) amongst others.
Hardy also regularly collaborates with Angolan composer Victor Gama on multimedia works that have been performed around the world. Her one woman performance piece, Museum of Lungs premiered in Johannesburg (September 2018), followed by dates at the ICA festival in Cape Town, and an extensive European tour, including dates at Kaserne, Basel and Spielart in Munich (2018 -2019).
She has just completed a libretto for a new opera with composer Bushra El-Turk , which won the Fedora – Generali Prize for Opera 2020 and will be performed All Arias festival (deSingel Antwerpen), Royal Opera House London and Festival d’Aix-en-Provence amongst others in 2022.
She’s currently working on a libretto for a new interpretation of Mozart’s Requiem Mass, commissioned by Sheffield University (UK). She is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Chicago, working on a multimedia
interdisciplinary project exploring biographies and geographies of breath, through a focus on colonial histories and postcolonial politics.
Tamara Guhrs is a playwright-scenographer who creates interactive theatre experiences rooted in ecosystemic thinking. Some notable productions include Terror is not the erotic commodity it used to be (NAF, 2003), Sie Weiss Alles (NAF, 2011) by James Cairns, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth (Sex Actually Festival, 2012), Night/Light with Danieyella Rodin (2017) and Ngale kwe Ndlu / The Other Side of the House (2018), a site-specific immersive performance installation on the Windybrow, which she created with Alex Halligey and Kwasha!
Her play Thin Air was shortlisted for the Imbewu Scribe Playwrighting Awards (2015) and won the 2019 Canada South Africa Women’s Playwriting Award (CASA). Her play for young audiences, Space Rocks was selected for the Kennedy Centre’s New Visions New Voices programme (Washington DC, 2016) and premiered at the ASSITEJ Congress (Cape Town, 2017) before touring nationally.
Guhrs co-founded the design collective Flying House with Jenni-lee Crewe, which in 2019 curated an exhibit for PQ19, the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, featuring the work of 10 South African fringe designer-scenographers.
She maintains a strong link with her Zambian roots, working with SEKA to agitate for community-based conservation and human-wildlife co-existence. She holds two MA degrees, in Dramatic Arts and Creative Writing, and she teaches participatory playmaking at Wits Drama for Life, Sacred Heart College and the Market Theatre Lab.