South Africa has a vibrant and thought-provoking performance art scene. In this smorgasbord, the work of Chuma Sopotela has struck me as the most interesting. Sopotela is a young black South African woman artist who has been working in the industry in Cape Town for over 15 years and has also travelled internationally. Whether it is that her work stems from a fixation with the physical body or that her physical body reflects and comments on bodies like mine, which I refer to as ‘black woman bodies,’ I am not certain. Sopotela, an artist trained principally as a performer who then segued into performance art, has an ability to use multiple modalities and media in interesting ways. As a black woman, her body both unintentionally and in more pointedly performative ways insists on deconstructing, destabilising and deliberately bringing into question spectators’ ideas of what black woman bodies do and signify.

I have had several interviews with Sopotela, telephonically, via e-mail, and in person, primarily between 2014 and 2016, in which we discussed her work and the work of other artists. In our 2015 e-mail correspondence, Sopotela indicated that: ‘What interests me is the gaze that history has given us. Historical books are not written by us, the black female bodies, but by many white bodies … This gaze was then transferred from generation to generation … Our own gaze as Africans shifted from that of Historical Black Africans to that of the slave traders/oppressor.’

This expression of her interest in how history positions narratives about bodies, particularly black female bodies, resonates strongly with me, as do the corporeal aspects of her works. This chapter is an excavation of Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda (‘The chicken has laid its eggs’), a work Sopotela first performed in Zurich in 2013, and in South Africa in 2014. In conversation with Sopotela and other theorists, I tease out the potentialities and implications of embodiment, social situatedness and what I see as her articulation of a black feminist performance language. I use these categories in an attempt to position Sopotela's layered and complex practice in the live art field in a context-specific way. I seek to concentrate on ‘the social and contextual nature of knowledge …