Aja Marneweck

• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at University of the Western Cape

In South Africa, puppetry is being explored in large-scale, site-specific ways to generate new public and cultural imaginings, especially within the minds of young people as they interrogate pressing issues around the environment, climate change, identity and conservation.

This article investigates the phenomenon of giant puppetry to publicly engage a politically, culturally and socially mobilizing politics of movement through the art of puppet walking in the 21st Century. The article considers two case studies where giant puppets walking through and between specific urban and rural geographies, engaging publics in t...

2020 marks the tenth anniversary of the Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade, a large-scale, experimental annual public puppetry event and performance in a small rural town in the Klein Karoo of South Africa. This multifaceted, collaborative puppet theatre-making process, which results annually in the creation of a parade and large-scale original performa...

The article explores the multifaceted process of creating the large-scale annual public puppetry event, The Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade, in the rural town of Barrydale, South Africa. It unpacks the complex layers of meaning and making arising through a co-creative puppetry project in a region of South Africa marked by poverty and the on-going eve...

The following article interprets the radical representational strategies of complex contemporary South African women's identities through puppetry and animist performance practices. I explicate these practices of performing complex identity through animism, as a Feminine Semiotic. The Feminine Semiotics of puppetry offer a representational strategy...

The following article interprets resistant representational strategies of the feminine through animism based creative practices such as puppetry. Acknowledging critical issues at the heart of identity, representation and embodiment in South Africa today, the Feminine Semiotics of animism seek new pathways to imagining feminine form, theory and bein...

The following research paper explicates a four year Practice as Research enquiry into the potential of puppetry and visual performance in the representation of a Feminine Semiotics for the 21st century. This enquiry manifests in a series of creative and research outputs that form the research body of the project entitled Plot 99. The Feminine Semio...

PLOT 99 is a creative and academic performance initiative that forms the cornerstone of ‘Aja Marneweck’s PHD, the first doctorate in Practice as Research in puppetry and gender, through the Drama Department of the University of Cape Town. The trajectory of her research methodologies over the past two years has forged new pathways in PAR research fo...

Performing a Theatre of Difference: Engendering the South African Stage. A Discussion of Contemporary South African Women’s Performance in the work of Berni Searle; the Mothertongue Theatre Project and The Paper Body Collective.

Antagonsing History: The Monstrous Masculine in Peter Van Heerden’s Bok By Aja Marneweck (Aja Marneweck is a visual theatre artist and published academic with a masters cum laude in theatre making. She works and teaches in Cape Town) Traversing the liminal body of contemporary white masculine identity and the ever-present resonances of its histo...