Insurrections Ensemble Performance - Defiant Currents

THE INSURRECTIONS ENSEMBLE | DEFIANT CURRENTS

The Living Rights Festival this year launches with the Insurrections Ensemble's Defiant Currents and a discussion between Professors Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Nomusa Makhubu.

The Ensemble is back and ready to present its set of Defiant Currents. As with its previous and award-winning sets it will be dealing with our loss of a moral compass, the sources of hope and the audacious ways African and Indian musical mastery is crafted to animate poetic expression. The threads that link Mzansi, the DRC, the Ethiopian highlands with the Indian sub-continent will be carefully embroidered.

The Ensemble: Selamawit Aragaw (violin), Sumangala Damodaran (lead vocals), Stephen de Souza (double bass), Sazi Dlamini (vocals, Nguni bows and winds, guitars and horns), Asher Gamedze (percussion), Pritam Ghosal (sarod), Today Kamoyi (lead vocals), Reza Khota (guitars), Lungiswa Plaatjies (lead vocals, mbira, bows), Ari Sitas (voice, soundscapes)

Recent works: Giraffe Humming (2022), The Story of a Strike (2023), Must Gandhi Fall? (2024)

Words: Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Vivek Narayanan, Sabitha Satchi, Tina Schouw and Ari Sitas

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ABOUT THE LIVING RIGHTS FESTIVAL

The Living Rights Festival is a Cape Town initiative that brings together artists, writers, scholars, activists and communities to explore the urgent struggles of our time through art, ideas and intergenerational dialogue.

Under the 2026 theme, “Rooting Change: Rupture and Renewal in a World of Disorder,” the Festival asks how we might confront the injustices and crises of our world while nurturing the imagination, solidarity and collective action needed to transform it.

Join us for an evening where ideas meet music, where art becomes a language of resistance, and where the possibilities for a different world come alive.