Da Costa, Neka, and Kamogelo Molobye. 2024. “Introduction: Uhambo: Translating Embodied Wanderings into Performance Practices and Epistemologies through Audio/Multimedia Walks.” Global Performance Studies 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv7n2a220
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From 2 to 5 August 2023, the Theatre and Performance and Drama for Life departments at the Wits School of Arts hosted the annual Performance Studies international Conference, PSi#28, in Johannesburg, South Africa, on the theme “Uhambo Luyazilawula: Embodied Wandering Practices.” This event gathered delegates from around the world who responded to the challenge of exploring what it means to engage with research, theories, practices, and pedagogies that focus on marginalised perspectives in performance studies. These approaches offered fresh insights to help shape the future of performance studies beyond its traditional margins.
Performance Studies, as both a research area and a practical field, emphasises the importance of viewing performance broadly, extending beyond theatre. It involves engaging with activities across all aspects of life, from human behaviour and cultural practices to artistic expressions. The field takes these everyday socio-cultural activities seriously, analysing their meanings and significance in various contexts. However, Performance Studies has been primarily shaped by Western epistemologies, emphasising text-based analysis, fixed theatrical settings, and Eurocentric ideas of embodiment (Schechner 2002, 2). Considering this, the conference organising committee needed to reflect on the position of the Global South within Performance Studies, especially in light of calls for decolonised and transformed epistemologies and pedagogies in institutions of teaching and learning.
Decolonisation involves advocating for practices that challenge colonial narratives that dominate and marginalise indigenous knowledge systems (Kessi et al. 2020, 271). The increasing emphasis on decolonising knowledge prompted the committee to reassess how performance, and Performance Studies in particular, are understood and practised, especially in the Global South. From a decolonial perspective, the conference theme provided a provocative framework for delegates to critically examine how Performance Studies addresses human experiences, dismantling ontological, epistemological, and practical boundaries that have often excluded marginalised groups. In this context, the IsiZulu concept of uhambo, meaning “a journey,” served as a compelling metaphor and practical approach to reimagining the discipline of Performance Studies.
The phrase “Uhambo Luyazilawula,” which roughly translates to “the journey guides itself” or “the journey follows its own rules,” captured an ethos of emergent, embodied, and nonlinear knowledge creation. The conference positioned Uhambo Luyazilawula as both a theoretical and practical framework for Performance Studies, emphasising creative, arts-based research and viewing the body as a site of epistemological inquiry. By embracing the unpredictability and agency of the journey, this approach challenged strict methodological norms, inviting new imaginings for performance scholarship and practice within African and broader Global South contexts.
This issue of Global Performance Studies is a continuation of the conversations we began at the 28th Performance Studies international conference, Uhambo Luyazilawula, held in Johannesburg in August 2023. Uhambo was our invitation for attendees to surrender to journeys that connect us, and to explore ways of understanding and critiquing how we came to be through praxis and reflection. Here, we extend that invitation to you, our readers and listeners, as you journey through the projects in this collection. Each of the contributing authors in this issue elaborates on the notion of uhambo to frame how they explore the environment and the self as archives and institutions of knowledge that contextually, socially, and culturally influence performance studies practices both in Africa and around the world. Framed through Performance Studies, uhambo is a creative art and a research paradigm through which practitioners and scholars can contemplate and unpack the significance of journeying as embodied practices of movement, nomadism, migration, immigration and cultural exchanges, among its many other dimensions. We position Uhambo Oluzilawulayo as a critical place studies framework that encourages intertextual critiques of space, location, society, culture, and politics, as necessary for the diversity of embodied knowledge emerging from communities and people (Stevenson 2008). Uhambo has inspired our contributors to engage in walking, travel or movement as a form of socio-cultural exchange to discover and reveal artistic and intellectual practices that assert the intersectionality of space and place as fluid creative stimuli intertwined with human experiences.
Uhambo Luyazilawula's intellectual depth is characterised by its resistance to being confined. Unlike Western concepts of journeys that focus on goals, efficiency, the destination, and fixed outcomes, uhambo emphasises the process, intuition, discovery, learning through doing, and bodily wisdom during movement. It recognises that the journey itself holds authority, as it “directs itself.” This perspective aligns with broader African philosophical traditions, which see knowledge as relational, contextual, and rooted in lived experience (Mbembe 2015). For instance, Traver Mudzonga's work “Sonic Kumema Poetic Uhambo: An experimental sonic and poetry reading in short chants as autoethnographic embodied wanderings translating parts of the author’s reflections while living in the diaspora” combines autoethnography, sonic experiences, and Tavara-Kore Kore epistemologies to examine diasporic identity. Focusing on the concepts of uhambo and kumema, the work interprets Mudzonga’s decade-long diasporic experiences across Southern Africa as a layered sonic poetic experience. Mudzonga merges recordings from Johannesburg and Harare with hymns and poetic chants to convey the emotional and cultural dissonance of displacement, exploring themes of self, ancestral heritage, and indigenous ways of knowing. In this work, Kumema, both as a methodology and a metaphor, frames Mudzonga’s wanderings as acts of exploring performative identities shaped by diasporic spaces.
Uhambo Luyazilawula presents a new perspective for Performance Studies by challenging the traditional Cartesian mind-body dualism that has shaped Western performance theory. Instead, it advocates a holistic epistemology where thinking, acting, and moving are interconnected. This aligns with Dwight Conquergood’s (2002, 145) emphasis on a “performative turn” that values embodied knowledge as much as textual analysis. Uhambo Luyazilawula develops Conquergood’s idea by situating it within specific cultural and linguistic frameworks, suggesting that the wandering body, the body on uhambo, is not merely an object of study but an active participant in creating meaning through movement.
This framework is inherently decolonial, opposing the extractive methods typical of traditional research that collect data in the Global South to analyse it elsewhere. Instead, Uhambo Luyazilawula emphasises that knowledge is created locally and contextually through an immersive, and sometimes chaotic, engagement process. If one were to summarise it, they would refer to the work of Catherine Cole (2010), who highlights in her study of African theatre that performance has long been a vital way of passing down history, critiquing society, and fostering community within a continuous cultural tradition. Uhambo Luyazilawula provides a name and structure to legitimise this practice as a valid scholarly approach.
Applying Uhambo Luyazilawula to performance theory shifts the focus from analysing static artefacts to engaging with ongoing processes. Instead of viewing performance as a final product to critique, it is considered a continual journey of becoming. This view aligns with José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “cruising utopia,” which imagines queer futures through embodied wandering and ecstatic temporality (2009, 25). Likewise, Uhambo Luyazilawula is a progressive practice that constantly allows for new futures through its dynamic movement.
We have chosen to locate this publication in the form of sound/audio and multimedia walks which, through active and immersive listening, conflate space, place and sound with critical documentation and reflection. Sound/audio walks and multimedia walks are provocations that invite listeners or audiences to take an actual and/or imaginative journey on a route or in a location carefully planned on a map or documented through photography, videography, or sonic scapes that capture a specific environment and narrative.
Sound/audio and multimedia walks extend the concept of uhambo through generating multisensory experiences that make knowledge sharing and production more inclusive and accessible. The communal mobility embraced by sound/audio and multimedia walks means that they are often site-specific in their documentation, containing recorded instructions for listeners and audiences to follow as they walk and engage with the stories or critical research shared by the author. For example, Annette Arlander's “Walking in the Woods” is a meditative video essay that traces the evolution of a performance practice through a series of embodied experiments with walking. Drawing on multiple residencies spanning six years, located in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, and Italy, Arlander explores the methodological and aesthetic potentials of walking with a head-mounted action camera. Departing from her established mode of performing for a static camera, she instead records her movement through natural environments, creating layered, diptych-style videos that insert one directional walk into its reverse counterpart. The resulting works, minimalist, durational, and often disorienting, foreground a heightened somatic awareness and an evolving inquiry into how repetition, rhythm, and spatial perception shape embodied knowledge. In the spirit of uhambo, Arlander’s work proposes walking as both a research method and a poetic encounter, reflecting on how ‘place’ is experienced, remembered, and recorded.
Similarly, Arun Sood's “Memory, Sound, and Orality: Re-inhabiting the Island of Vallay” presents an immersive soundwalk on Scotland’s tidal island, Vallay, combining field recordings, oral histories, and music to reimagine its layered history. Based on winter tide patterns, it layers spoken word and music over ambient sounds, such as wind and waves, at high and low tides to trigger a kind of transcendence into memories and reminiscence. Sood’s project explores Vallay’s history through its acoustic ruins, combining personal and colonial histories. Through distortions, looping, and reconfiguration, the soundwalk frees Vallay’s sounds from geographic fixity, offering a counterpoint to static excavations to redefine heritage as an embodied and acoustic practice and experience. This is the invitation to the listener to perceive history as a resonant, living space rather than a silent artefact.
Uhambo considers sound/audio or multimedia walks as an entry point to create dynamic research that reflects on the relationships between humans, communities and the politics of indigenous knowledge gathered and developed through practices of movement, mapping, sensory and immersive performance, conceptual art practices, photography and sonic installations (Hauge 2007). Through the curation of ten sound/audio and multimedia walks, we have collated research that questions the creation, production, reproduction and legitimacy of knowledge, both inside and outside of institutions. Our contributors grapple with knowing as interpersonal construction, knowing as re-membering, knowing as contextually situated, and knowing as located through body, place, and time (Risner 2014, 155). Each author expands the notion of uhambo in multiple contexts, using the personal-as-political, the personal-as-pedagogic, and the personal-as-epistemic to excavate endemic vocabularies and prioritise ‘original’ knowledges that store, transfer, and disseminate history and philosophical wisdom (Magoqwana 2018).
This is powerfully demonstrated in works that engage directly with decolonial and resistance practices. Refiloe Lepere's “Combat Breathing Mixtape: A Meditation, Lament, and Performance” blends music, poetry, and soundscapes to examine breath as a symbol of resilience, trauma, and resistance within Black feminist and decolonial contexts. Lepere combines theory and art, framing the mixtape as a decolonial aesthetic of resistance where soundscapes and storytelling challenge dominant narratives. The work demonstrates how Black feminist world-making transforms personal anguish into collective revolt, underscoring the breath’s role in sustaining life amid systemic oppression. It focuses on Frantz Fanon’s concept of “combat breathing” and explores how marginalised groups transform grief and oppression into collective survival strategies. Lepere demonstrates breath as a form of resistance, linking it to Shange’s reinterpretation of Fanon and Sharpe’s “The Wake” to critique anti-Black violence. Javier Perez's work, “’It was the slave that actually pushed the sea back’: An experimental analysis of a previously-incarcerated groups’ walking history tour to the Castle of Good Hope through found poetry and sonic sampling”, is inspired by Douglas Kearney’s performative typography as it transforms a recorded tour—facilitated by social history educator Nadjwa Damon—into an immersive, poetic, and auditory experience. As participants walk from Church Square to the Castle, they draw deeply personal parallels between colonial sites of enslavement and contemporary carceral systems. Through layered narratives and spatial provocations, the work navigates the temporal and ontological resonances between slavery and incarceration, evoking what Andrew Brooks calls “fugitive speech acts.” The central metaphor—“the slave that actually pushed the sea back”—emerges as a profound summation of the group’s reflections on invisibilised Black labour, memory, and the violent erasures embedded in the Cape’s built environment.
Other contributions use the audio walk format to critique urban and social structures. Yusril Nurhidayat et al’s project “Improvised Access: Listening for African Migrants’ Journeys through an Abu Dhabi Public Park” is an exploration into how African migrants in Abu Dhabi use Electra Park to navigate exclusion and create opportunities. The group of researchers use ethnographic research and a sonic soundwalk to highlight migrants’ survival strategies in a city with spatial segregation and social hierarchies. Due to their race, class, and migration status, African migrants often lack access to the formal infrastructure of Gulf cities and employ improvisational urbanism as adaptive strategies, utilising resources to transform spaces into areas for networking, job-seeking, and community building. The soundwalk project combines audio clips and narratives, illustrating how migrants use the park to counter structural barriers. By centring migrants’ voices, the project critiques the exclusionary logic of Gulf urban planning and advocates for inclusive policies, reimagining public spaces as sites of agency and belonging for marginalised communities.
In a similar vein, Myer Taub and Bettina Malcomess explore walking as a performative and decolonial act that addresses Johannesburg’s urban crisis in “Dirty Walks”. Presented as a fragmented, dyslexic multi-modal journal, the article combines Discord archives, theatre dialogues, and speculative writing to reflect on the city’s collapsing infrastructure and ecological fragility. The authors propose “dirty walks” as a form of resistance to urban decay and colonial legacies, blending personal stories with critiques of racial capitalism and the Anthropocene. The article’s non-linear structure, which blends Discordant Elements, theatrical performativity, and reflective prose, effectively captures Johannesburg’s dissonance in its writing style. Filmed dialogues on stage construct walks tracing personal histories with a broader critique of whiteness, queerness, and privilege in navigating public spaces. By emphasising their white and queer positionality in a racially segregated city, Taub and Malcomess challenge colonial ideas of mobility and visibility, using de Certeau’s “tactics” to undermine urban control. Their work proposes walking as a redemptive technology to reimagine cities through glitches, leaks, and collective unlearning.
The framework of uhambo also provides a lens to interrogate the very nature of wandering and who it is for. Anne Stoner's “Desired Paths, Required Movement: A Guide to Travelling with Chronic Illness in This Place” provides a necessary critique of the ableist foundations of Western walking discourse through an audio walk, accompanied by maps, that challenge the notion of urban navigation. The article calls into question romanticised notions of wandering to expose how they exclude non-normative bodies. Stoner argues that mobility privileges able-bodied groups, while marginalised groups face policing, harassment, and systemic barriers. Expanding the concept of journeying to include multispecies and ecological relations, Joanne Scott's “Invisability, Movement and Agency: Exploring Plant-Human Relationships in the Plantationocene” is a rich, site-generic soundwalk that brings participants into critical, embodied dialogue with the legacies of colonial plant-human entanglements in the Plantationocene. Through a layered sonic composition that integrates vocal textures, looped song, digital scoring, and spatialised direction, Scott invites listeners to attune to the vegetal life around them—not as passive background but as active, agentic beings shaped by and resisting extractive plantation logics. Drawing from critical plant studies, decolonial ecologies, and Indigenous relational ontologies, the soundwalk offers a mobile inquiry into notions of “cheap nature,” vegetal labour, and invasibility, challenging participants to consider whose lifeways are deemed out of place and by whom. By foregrounding questions of attention, scale, temporality, and multispecies justice, the piece proposes listening and walking as radical methods of noticing, unsettling, and reworlding.
Finally, Julieanna Preston's “A Letter Last: When I’m calling you-ou-ou ooooooooooo” is a performative writing essay that reflects on HARK (2021), a seven-night spoken word performance in Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa New Zealand, where she reads letters to her Croatian great-grandmother, Stança, at seven houses they inhabited as migrants. The paper combines autotheory, sound art, and feminist critique to explore themes of belonging, migration, and settler identity. Each site-specific reading, shaped by weather, urban ambience, and vocal delivery, transformed the city into a spatio-temporal theatre, challenging wairua to connect ancestral and geographic divides. The letters, performed publicly, serve as sonic migrations pleas to reconcile the author’s Pākehā identity with Indigenous belonging in a bicultural nation. The performative writing presents HARK as a reimagined autobiography, assembling fragmented histories to question whose stories are acknowledged.
To walk, to wander, and to embody is to recontextualise cultures, traditions, and identities, incorporating them into new ways of self-understanding that inform performance studies (Okere 1983). Our contributors use sound/audio or multimedia walks to critique the complexities and nuances that emerge from themselves and their environments, particularly considering that uhambo centres living and embodied epistemes as legitimate forms of knowledge that can inform, challenge and decolonise contemporary performance practices.
This collection of audio walks demonstrates that uhambo is more than a theoretical framework; it is a vital decolonial praxis. By privileging the wandering, sensing body as a primary site of knowledge production, these works collectively challenge the extractive, text-heavy, and Eurocentric foundations of Performance Studies. They do not merely represent research; they are the research itself, embodied, situated, and politically resonant critiques of space, history, and the body. Through their sonic wanderings, the contributors enact a radical epistemological shift, moving the field towards a more inclusive, multiversal future where knowledge is not just analysed but lived, felt, walked, and journeyed into being.
We would like to thank the following people who helped us put together both this journal issue and the Performance Studies international conference #28:
Felipe Cervera, Theron Schmidt, and the Global Performance Studies editorial team
The GPS Uhambo contributing authors
Matshepo Molefe and Lwazi Pinyana, research assistants
Hamish Mabala Neill, Tumy Motsoatsoe and Traver Mudzonga, our conference visionaries
The whole PSi Conference organisational team and student volunteers
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Hauge, Åshild Lappegard. 2007. “Identity and Place: A Critical Comparison of Three Identity Theories.” Architectural Science Review 50 (1): 44-51. https://doi.org/10.3763/asre.2007.5007.
Kessi, Shose, Zoe Marks, and Elelwani Ramugondo. 2020. “Decolonizing African Studies.” Critical African Studies 12 (3): 271–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2020.1813413.
Magoqwana, Babalwa. 2018. “Repositioning uMakhulu as an Institution of Knowledge: Beyond ‘Biologism’ towards uMakhulu as the Body of Indigenous Knowledge.” In Whose History Counts: Decolonising African Pre-Colonial Historiography, edited by June Bam, Lungisile Ntsebeza, and Allan Zinn, 75–89. African Sun Media.
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Risner, Doug. 2000. “Making Dance, Making Sense: Epistemology and Choreography.” Research in Dance Education 1 (2): 155–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/713694259.
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