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This dissertation originated from an interest in museum architecture and the desire to improve museum experiences for the inhabitants of Pretoria. The city is in need of a museum that does not distinguish between different cultures and backgrounds, and that provides an experience that a regular city user can relate to. This dissertation aims to address this need with the creation of a museum that relies on a chance museum encounter in an everyday place. This museum encounter will enrich people’s daily city experiences and provide opportunity for self-reflection and contemplation. The dissertation proposes a new satellite museum for the existing Ditsong: National Museum of Cultural History as a method of exposing the public to this museum. This satellite museum will function as a branch of the larger museum. The aim of this satellite museum is to provide regular users of the city with an unexpected museum experience. This dissertation considers what a contemporary museum in the inner city of Pretoria should be in terms of function and architectural implementation. The document investigates contemporary trends in museum architecture and evaluates existing museums in Pretoria. It also includes an investigation into culture in South Africa and into the relation of the satellite museum to its context. The study concludes that a contemporary museum experience is one that facilitates continuous change, and provides a spatial experience that blurs the threshold between the new museum and existing public space. / Dissertation (MInt(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Architecture / unrestricted

ACAB is a work of notated music for string orchestra, synthesizer, piano, timpani, and tape. The piece serves as a commentary and critique of police in American society, utilizing excerpted recordings of poetry and speeches, in conjunction with various noises such as sirens and gunshots, alongside an orchestral background to abstractly depict a dynamic and critical view of the role of the police in America. The piece is approximately fifteen minutes in duration.

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Repository copy includes the score of 16 pages, including 1 page of performance instruction, in a pdf format from the original, edited in Sibelius 8.2.0. / Barzakh means separation in Arabic. Moreover, in the Islamic eschatology, it is a barrier between the physical and spiritual worlds. In this piece, I am using this idea as an inspiration to my creation so that a disrupting sound and its developments are separating the sound worlds and opening new dimensions for new musical spaces. The piece is composed for string quartet and its duration is approximately 9 minutes.

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This dissertation engages Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin and his movement language Gaga as significant and celebrated in the world of dance in the contemporary moment. Naharin’s choreography and Gaga present significant contradictions that ultimately reveal important tensions at work in the category of the contemporary. I unpack what I identify to be five tensions in place. First, Gaga is discursively and critically described as a style and technique, yet Naharin rejects these classifications. Second, Naharin disavows politics in his choreography, yet his work cannot be separated from the politics of his and Batsheva’s home base in the State of Israel. The third tension can be found within the language and principles of Gaga itself as a practice of producing and managing embodied contradiction. Fourth, Naharin claims Gaga as a universally accessible “toolbox” for all movers and all other forms of dance, yet it is uniquely personal. Its applicability to other forms of dance reveals important paradoxes in older genres of dance as they endure in the twenty-first century. Fifth, as a practice marketed separately to “dancers” and “people,” Gaga problematizes the distinction between high art concert dance and popular dance. Ultimately, this project demonstrates the significance of Gaga as a movement practice. The context of its development and deployment, its particular dynamic aesthetic, and the way it circulates among communities of professional dancers and non-dancers all point to the complexities of this form that exemplify the complexities of the contemporary as a multi-faceted category and signifier.This research is foregrounded in my experiences as a professional dancer taking Gaga classes, workshops and intensives in New York City and Tel Aviv from 2011-2016, and backed by research in the field of dance studies, critical reviews, rhetorical and discursive analysis, and close readings of Naharin’s choreography and of Gaga movement. This research engages the complexities in the relationship between these aesthetic, rhetorical, discursive, and embodied contradictions and the contemporary as the label holding them together. I ask how Naharin and Gaga articulate the contradictory terms of this elusive category. This project furthers the academic discourse on Gaga and Naharin as well as broader scholarly studies of popular dance and concert dance practices and aesthetics of the twenty-first century. / Dance

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