Exit/Exist: Gregory Maqoma's dance and the call to life

Abstract

The paper explores life-giving qualities of creativity and self-stylisation in the performance art and dance of contemporary South African choreographer Gregory Maqoma. Placing his performance Exit/Exist in conversation with social theories of becoming, desire and futurity explored in the work of anthropologists Elizabeth Povinelli and Henrietta Moore, and the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, the paper gestures towards a vitalist understanding of sociality. The approach suggests potentiality rather than limitation, fragmentation and depletion. In the face of a neo-liberal world order and the lingering influence of apartheid history, much of South African social analysis continues to reiterate forms of structural violence that constrain lives. Such an emphasis cannot account for the ways in which individuals sometimes force celebratory and defiant images of themselves into the public realm, issuing into being new publics, locally and abroad.