Senses of Ensemble by Asher Gamedze

Join the Department of Performance Studies as we welcome Asher Gamedze, a cultural worker based in Cape Town, South Africa, to give a talk on the senses of ensemble. This conversation will be moderated by Professor Fred Moten.

Three senses of ensemble:

I. As the root, basis and motive principle of black creative music – its performance, study and movement;

II. As practice and personnel, being central to the development of outside political traditions; and

III. As both the condition of possibility to “research” ensemble histories, and, following logically therefore, the method.

I was grasping towards a language that felt resonant with the actual process and experience of research – hanging out with and talking to old comrades and looking through their and their families’ materials. I was searching for a grammar organic to the particular history of organizing that I was interested in, a history that (was) refused a single party or stable political home over its long trajectory. What was the thread that, for over thirty years (and more), held together and made possible this minoritarian tendency’s ongoing experimentation with the form and content of study and struggle in the liberation movement in South Africa and Namibia? What was the creative source that generated the distinctive ideas, projects and organizational forms which together constituted a black tradition of independent socialist politics?

Asher Gamedze is a cultural worker based in Cape Town, South Africa. He works in a freelance capacity as an itinerant researcher and writer, a musician – both as a bandleader in his own projects and a session player in others’ – as well as an organizer, and sometimes popular educator, in autonomous cultural and social movements. Asher’s music has received critical acclaim internationally and he has performed at major venues and festivals in South Africa, Eswatini, Egypt, Netherlands, USA, Turkiye, Malawi, Belgium, Poland and many other countries. His writing has been published widely across various academic journals, independent activist magazines, online news platforms, art publications and thought-blogs. His PhD, which he is currently turning into as book, was completed in 2024 at the History Workshop at Wits University and wrote a history of the development of a relatively obscured independent black left political tradition in the South African and Namibian liberation struggle/s from the late 1950s until the mid-1980s.

Photo Credit: Lungiswa Gqunta

Host or Publisher NYU’s Performance Studies Department