Balindile ka Ngcobo M.A.:

Balindile ka Ngcobo is a South African performer, theatremaker and writer. She is a doctoral candidate in the Theatre Studies department at the Ruhr Universität Bochum, where she works in the Emmy Noether Research Group “Dramaturgies in the Afterlife of Violence: Transnational Theatre between the Global South and the North”. Her work investigates representational violence, dismantles colonial tropes and traces the ways in which the Black female body serves as a repository for memory – in postapartheid South Africa and across the diaspora.

After obtaining her BA in Live Performance (AFDA Cape Town), she joined Johannesburg’s Market Theatre as an ensemble company member. Balindile went on to pursue her MA in Theatre & Performance at the University of Cape Town, where her research focused on the ‚Mbokodofication‘ of Black women (or, the production of the ‚Strong Black Woman‘ trope) in the South African context. Taking on a Practice as Research methodology, Ngcobo produced a thesis and production which presented a genealogy of the Black women characters who have shaped the South African literary canon. 2023, Ngcobo returned to the Market Theatre as an Associate Playwright, where she developed her own writing, as well as evaluated plays for development and future production. She is also an alumnus of the University of Johannesburg Arts & Culture Playwriting Lab.

• Practice as Research
• Transgenerational trauma and contemporary Violence Against Women
• Representational violence and Decolonial approaches
• Critiques of post-apartheid theatre and performance practices

• Ngcobo, B. 2023. Aesthetic distance as deus ex machina when the performer’s trauma is (not quite/quiet). South African Theatre Journal DOI: 10.1080/10137548.2023.2241463

• Ngcobo, B., 2021. The Mbokodofication of Black women: an autoethnographic study of post-dramatic stress and the Strong Black Woman trope. Master of Arts. University of Cape Town.

• Ngcobo, B. 2020. Khululeka, or The Monomyth of NoBANtu and the Ppl. Performance lecture, Artistic Research Africa, University of the Witwatersrand.