Jessica Lejowa

Botswana

Jessica completed her Masters Studies at Wits in mid-2010. Her work has been characterised by giving voice to herself as a woman, and allowing other people who live in the margins to give themselves voices. The 969 Festival in 2008 was her first platform: She worked on a production, Even as I Walk, with four women, where they investigated what it means to experience various kinds of death—as women—and still carry on walking.
The Drama for Life Festival in 2008 was her platform to engage with Kabi Thulo (then a lecturer in the Division of Dramatic Art and a Masters candidate), a Sangoma who was also a theatre maker, to bring the worlds of the sacred and the theatre together. They brought to the centre the possibility of spirituality that can be shared, and in this way, addressed the marginality of the world of a healer in a context such as a university. The Wages of Sin (National Arts Festival, 2009) explored the various ways in which societal moral codes can be restrictive and detrimental to the freedoms that women in Africa would like to enjoy, such as the right to raise a child as a single parent, the right to choose their sexual orientation and the desire not to be judged by our appearance. She worked with seven women on this project.

Jessica finds it focuses on the experiences of women as her own experience of life is coloured by gendered norms and values. Her research report for her Master’s degree, revolved around her work with women, and the impact of gender on theatre practice (itself a gendered domain). She lectures in the Division of Dramatic Art, and one of the modules Jessica teaches is a course in Drama and Film, which investigates gender, sex and sexuality in spectatorship.