Neo Muyanga is a composer, theatre-maker and musician whose practice straddles the spheres of performance and scholarship. His various works – including operas, multimedia installations, performance lectures and commercially released music albums – are informed by archival research and focus on investigating voice as a vector of suture and social innovation. Born in Soweto, Muyanga’s compositional influences include South African choral music and struggle songs (which he grew up singing) as well as Italian madrigal part songs, Ethiopian Mezmur and the Shaabi music of Egypt, which he encountered during formal studies.
Muyanga holds an MA in theatre making and is currently pursuing PhD research contrasting the choral practices of ancient Greek tragedy against the musical theatre traditions of various African peoples. Muyanga has been a composer-in-residence at the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival and the National Arts Festival, Makhanda (2017), an alumnus of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD (2016), Berlin, and has held residencies at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, Irvine (2014), and the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (2013). Recent works include Spells Against Othering (2023) in Rotterdam, A Mass of Cyborgs (2022-2023) in New York, How Anansi Freed the Stories of the World (2021) in Amsterdam, and A Maze in Grace (2020-2021) premiered at the Bienal de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo.
South Africa