HOW PERFORMANCE THEORY HELPS US UNDERSTAND MORE ABOUT ROCK ART
By:
Dr David Witelson
Date:
Thu, 07/03/2024 - 19:30 to 20:30
Venue:
The Auditorium, Roedean School, 35 Princess of Wales Terrace, Parktown, Johannesburg
Branch:
Northern
HOW PERFORMANCE THEORY HELPS US UNDERSTAND MORE ABOUT ROCK ART
By: Dr David Witelson
Date: Thursday, 07 March 2024 Time: 19:30
Venue: The Auditorium, Roedean School,
35 Princess of Wales Terrace, Parktown, Johannesburg
Charge: Non-members: R50, members: free
Southern Africa’s San (Bushman) rock art is some of the best understood globally. In this region, rich ethnographic records combine with highly detailed images and sophisticated social theory to reveal how the indigenous image-makers thought and lived. The enormous advances in the shamanistic interpretation of the art since the 1970s are well known, but more recent research has focused on the close relationships between the different forms of San expressive culture observed by anthropologists, such as trance dances and storytelling, to better understand more about now unobservable rock art practices. These performances brought meaningful concepts into being.
Southern Africa’s San (Bushman) rock art is some of the best understood globally. In this region, rich ethnographic records combine with highly detailed images and sophisticated social theory to reveal how the indigenous image-makers thought and lived. The enormous advances in the shamanistic interpretation of the art since the 1970s are well known, but more recent research has focused on the close relationships between the different forms of San expressive culture observed by anthropologists, such as trance dances and storytelling, to better understand more about now unobservable rock art practices. These performances brought meaningful concepts into being.
In this talk, Dr Witelson will present his new book, Theatres of Imagery: A Performance Theory Approach to Rock Art Research, in which he uses rock paintings from the Eastern Cape’s Stormberg mountains to understand some of the interactions between image-making ‘performers’ and their ‘audiences’ on which society itself was contingent.
Dr David Witelson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Rock Art Research Institute. His research interests include the Later Stone Age hunter-gatherer rock arts of southern Africa and the performative practices they involved. He works closely with the rock art itself as well as ethnographic and historical evidence to study the social contexts in which the making and viewing of images was socially significant in the pre-colonial past.
REPORT BACK FROM THE TALK ADDED ON 5 MAY 2024:
REPORT BACK FROM THE TALK ADDED ON 5 MAY 2024:
On Thursday 7 March 2024, I gave a presentation about my recently published doctoral thesis, Theatres of Imagery: A Performance Theory Approach to Rock Art Research (2023, British Archaeological Reports). The book develops and applies ‘performance theory’ (a way of thinking about performances involving some kind of performer and audience) to hunter-gatherer rock paintings in the Stormberg mountains of the Eastern Cape.
The Stormberg is the beautiful and rugged southern extent of the Drakensberg Escarpment (Fig. 1). I have worked there since 2018, greatly aided by Ben Maclennan, the voluntary chairman and all-rounder at the Anderson Museum in the town of Dordrecht. My fieldwork involved visiting painted sites in person to study them with my own eyes before taking a series of high-resolution photographs that could be further studied later. At some sites, the original paintings were carefully traced, using a precise method developed by early members of the Rock Art Research Institute. On some of the trips I was joined by RARI staff and also by undergraduate students from Oxford University.
Figure 1: The Stormberg before a storm.
Figure 2: Taking photographs of rock art with Prof. David Pearce.
In my talk, I noted that some images in the Drakensberg region were made as recently as the 19th century. We know of two BaPhuthi people from Lesotho with part-San ancestry who demonstrated first-hand painting experience in 1932. More generally, however, the oldest rock paintings in the wider Drakensberg area have been dated by radiocarbon to around 3,000 years ago. In that area, as in the Stormberg, some of the oldest paintings are beautiful shaded polychrome eland. They are often covered by more recent images in bright colours that lack shading. Many of these depict domestic animals as well as African and European farmers. The eminent South African artist, Walter Battiss, wrote about this element of the art and his ideas were helpful in my research.
Figure 3: A shaded polychrome eland from the Stormberg.
Figure 4: A group of brightly coloured, unshaded eland from the Stormberg.
We know from previous work that the images were deeply significant for the people who made them. The San peoples of southern Africa are the direct genetic and cultural descendants of hunter-gatherer populations who made rock paintings. The high degree of correspondence between records of San groups across southern Africa in the 18th to 21st centuries and the rock art shows that, for the most part, it was people knowledgeable about spiritual matters and skilled in other areas of life who made the rock paintings as part of their dealing with those matters on behalf of their communities. Many images therefore depict or refer to the central ritual of San life, the communal healing or trance dance, and a highly symbolic animal that pervades San life, the eland antelope.
Figure 5: A San trance dance. Image by Kgara Kevin Rack. Used here under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103241738
Figure 6: A common eland bull. Image by Bernard Dupont. CC BY-SA 2.0 licence, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75247362
Figure 1: The Stormberg before a storm.
Figure 2: Taking photographs of rock art with Prof. David Pearce.
In my talk, I noted that some images in the Drakensberg region were made as recently as the 19th century. We know of two BaPhuthi people from Lesotho with part-San ancestry who demonstrated first-hand painting experience in 1932. More generally, however, the oldest rock paintings in the wider Drakensberg area have been dated by radiocarbon to around 3,000 years ago. In that area, as in the Stormberg, some of the oldest paintings are beautiful shaded polychrome eland. They are often covered by more recent images in bright colours that lack shading. Many of these depict domestic animals as well as African and European farmers. The eminent South African artist, Walter Battiss, wrote about this element of the art and his ideas were helpful in my research.
Figure 3: A shaded polychrome eland from the Stormberg.
Figure 4: A group of brightly coloured, unshaded eland from the Stormberg.
We know from previous work that the images were deeply significant for the people who made them. The San peoples of southern Africa are the direct genetic and cultural descendants of hunter-gatherer populations who made rock paintings. The high degree of correspondence between records of San groups across southern Africa in the 18th to 21st centuries and the rock art shows that, for the most part, it was people knowledgeable about spiritual matters and skilled in other areas of life who made the rock paintings as part of their dealing with those matters on behalf of their communities. Many images therefore depict or refer to the central ritual of San life, the communal healing or trance dance, and a highly symbolic animal that pervades San life, the eland antelope.
Figure 5: A San trance dance. Image by Kgara Kevin Rack. Used here under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103241738
Figure 6: A common eland bull. Image by Bernard Dupont. CC BY-SA 2.0 licence, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75247362
Because no San rock paintings are made today, we need some other way of addressing their making and viewing in context. This is where performance theory comes in. It helps us think about the painters and viewers as performers and audience. It is especially relevant because we know a lot about other San performances, like dances, story-telling and initiation ceremonies, but have little information about the making of rock painting. It is my argument that rock art was also performed. This gives us a new question to ask: for whom were the paintings made?
I ended my talk by explaining how I think that thinking about the interactions between the ‘performers’ and the ‘audience’ helps us understand why the art changed from older shaded polychromes to more recent brighter and unshaded images. Simply put, and building on previous research, when African herders and farmers entered southern Africa around 2,000 years ago, the make-up of southern African society changed dramatically. Hunter-gatherers faced new needs, and demands came into being. ‘Performances’ of rock art were one of the arenas in which new forces played out. Performing the art in new ways was one of the responses to the new social realities that hunter-gatherers faced.
Photographs supplied by David Witelson