Elegy - for a poet

Elegy is a life-work of mourning.
It is a cry, a lament, a tender refrain of
remembrance, repair and black feminist love.

For over a decade now, Gabrielle Goliath has staged performances of Elegy across South Africa and the world, invoking the absent presence of women and LGBTIQ+ people lost to fatal acts of racial-sexual violence. In each performance, a group of seven women singers collectively sustain a single, haunting tone for the course of an hour. As one singer falters, another steps up to pick up the note, and so it continues: a cyclic threading of shared breath and voice.

Sounding within this sacral chamber are three new suites of Elegy performances. Together they tend to an entanglement of hurts, from the crisis of rape culture and femicide in South Africa, to the erasure of Ovaherero and Nama life-worlds in Namibia, and the orchestrated displacement and killing of Palestinian women, children, and civilians.

Refusing spectacle and the objectification of bodies deemed rapeable and killable, Elegy asserts conditions of hope and avowal: affirming black, brown, indigenous, femme, queer and trans lives as loveable and grieveable. It is a work of regard, of specificity and care. For those immersed in its sonic vigil, it offers a space for shared grief and radical refusal - for the urgent, ongoing life-work of mourning.

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> Elegy - Ipeleng Christine Moholane

> Elegy - for two ancestors

> Elegy - for a poet