Oupa Sibeko’s strategic acts of play

Oupa Sibeko is an artist of infinite hopefulness. His work is grounded in a thesis of play — that play keeps despair away. As a performance artist, he says that he tries “to see every space as both inhabitable and non-inhabitable for both performance and for living”.

Sibeko has played in dingy street corners and hyper-clean galleries, amid people in transit to work or back, and in the snow as readily as in a large pot or top of a burning braai stand. Sibeko sees a world replete with spaces where humans, plants and animal life can no longer coexist. And yet, his capacity to see an opportunity to play “everywhere” allows him to manufacture experiences of performance that are both fully cognisant of difficult topics while inviting people to step into the spirit of a game; to try make sense of the ill-fitting puzzle pieces of the world at hand.

In Fly Feathers (2018), performed at Sibeko’s first visit to the My Body My Space Festival (MBMS), in rural eMakhazeni in Mpumalanga, Sibeko attempts to “give a bird life”, he says. He places a duck-feather pillow, a bottle of honey, a loaf of brown bread and a pair of scissors on the floor in front of his body. He describes the performance as him smearing the body with honey, cutting open the pillow and trying to wash the body with feathers using bread to apply the feather-cleaning-product. The simplicity of this performance act enables a complex performance of the mind to take place.

“What MBMS does as a festival is [it enables you to] learn that language is limiting, so you can think with the body and perform with the mind. The performance, the work is deeply conceptual”, Sibeko said of performing at his favourite festival. And the activity of puzzling is precisely what Sibeko hopes his work activates. The body becomes material, so he hopes that people ask how the body turns into a bird, rather than suspending disbelief. Experiencing a body attempting to take flight via meagre materials positions one in the experience of pathos simultaneous with logic. Sibeko wants people to ask, ‘Why am I playing into this game?’ Absurdity demands courage from humanity.

About his second and third performances at the same festival, MBMS, Sibeko said he asked himself how to implicate people in the crime of the game. He shares that his mode of playing flips a game into space for reflection. “You were there when he braaied himself, when he played golf with eggs,” Sibeko says as a direct challenge.

As a writer, I attended the festival and was among people who laughed and played along while discomforted by Sibeko’s waste-game. It was Catch 22 (2019), where Sibeko hit eggs as though they were golf balls and people’s heads were the holes to land the “balls”. The experience directly affected all who circled the performer. People were also party to the ritual of braai day which Sibeko hosted at MBMS on September 24 2023.

For Braaivleis and Mankwebevu, Sibeko placed his body atop a braai stand with burning coals inside, as people were served “shit” in the form of cow dung on paper plates. The performer allowed the game of performance to challenge rituals of Heritage Day and its meaning. Without speaking, he signalled to the language of heritage, ritual, performance, violence, nationality, and many possible connotations for his acts in relation to the braai at hand. Sibeko’s provocative playfulness is strategic.

Play is a long game in the process of learning how to create different outcomes to what the world offers. Sibeko terms his strategic play-practice a ‘dialogue’. It is a practice he works at daily. Sibeko’s work discusses serious matters with playful implication of his body along with everyone who interacts. His discussions are a ritual, a game, and fight for hope. He enters dialogue with (his) body as engaged material. He engages dialogue through soft provocation by constantly flipping the switch of language to attention; showing how language numbs experience but can become sensitising if it is used to coax humour.

Preparing to perform at the MBMS festival for the fourth time, Sibeko says, “I’m a child of this festival. That space, energy, community. It taught me that one shouldn’t be boxed... It humbles you. It’s brutal. It moulds you in a different way”.

Performing what he calls his graduating piece, after four years of returning to the festival that turned him into the artist he has become, Sibeko hopes to challenge the 10th anniversary of the festival through a piece titled Gcwala 10! 10! The production will consider Mpumalanga and illegal mining as an activity that takes place in back yards, but which people distance themselves from and render the so-called “zama zamas” as unknowable elements of greed. To bring this close to home, Sibeko turns to the pillow again. A provocative flight of fancy awaits festival visitors as Sibeko strategises for shared imagination, playful participation and language reversals that open ritualised reflection.

My Body My Space Festival happens across Emakhazeni, Mpumalanga from March 10 - 15.