Artist Talk with Neo Muyanga: “Bow About: Blood Sweat and Fears - Reading Wole Soyinka’s Classics from a Troubled State, Today”

On Monday 29th of April, we hosted the South African composer, theatre maker and installation artist Neo Muyanga for an artist talk titled Bow About: Blood Sweat and Fears – Reading Wole Soyinka’s Classics from a Troubled State, Today. Currently pursuing doctoral research contrasting the choral practices of ancient Greek tragedy with various African musical theatre traditions, Neo reflected on his staged, acoustic reading of Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides, and engaged us on discussions on contemporary politics and sound in the Global South.

Announcement of the event:

Neo Muyanga is a composer and installation artist. His work traverses new opera, improv and African idiomatic song. Having studied the madrigal tradition in Trieste, Italy, Muyanga composes chamber operas, musical pieces and musical works for large and mixed ensembles. He uses a syncretic aesthetic that simultaneously references the traditional singing modes of Basotho and Zulu, free jazz, and the Western baroque. Currently, his research and performance interests include investigations and explorations of the aesthetics of protest song, with a particular focus on opera within the black community in South Africa, and more broadly concerning the history of musical story-telling in the Global South. He splits his time between Cape Town and Johannesburg, where he works as the Impresario at the Centre for The Less Good Idea.

Recently, and as part of his first programme as The Centre’s Impresario, Muyanga arranged and led a staged, accoustic reading of Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite. He then moderated an artist dialogue between Wole Soyinka and William Kentridge, wherein the trio discussed the nature of failure, the forms of tragedy and their African manifestations in culture and literature, and the forthcoming collaborative book combining Soyinka’s epic tragic poetry with Kentridge’s drawings.

In “Bow About: Blood, Sweat and Fears – Reading Soyinka’s Classics from a Troubled State, Today” Muyanga will present an account of his reading of Soyinka’s Bacchae, and encourage a collective exploration of its contemporary relevance.