Call and Response: Practicing the Respons(ability) of Embodied Dialogue
This participatory presentation explores call and response as a method for recognising the respons(ability) of and to be in dialogue with our bodies—an invitation to co-create with the body as a site of knowledge and possibility, especially in spaces where linear and hierarchical thought dominates.
What if language begins in the body, long before words arrive? How do we listen to what is already felt but not yet named? Rooted in Zulu and Xhosa storytelling traditions, this practice of embodied dialogue traces the shape of reciprocal attentiveness through memory, movement, voice, and text.
As Audre Lorde reminds us, poetry is not a luxury but a necessity—a space for hopeful criticism, for dreaming into futures we do not yet see but that our bodies already yearn for. In a time when our bodies carry so much, call and response becomes a practice of both witnessing and world-making, offering a language that emerges from the body’s own knowing.
Nomakhwezi Becker is a South African-German interdisciplinary performer, facilitator and writer. Through theatre, poetry, and storytelling, she explores collaborative distant intimacy and creating home in-between multiple heritages and languages. Her practice is informed by the wisdom of Call and Response from South African storytelling as a tool for reciprocal attentiveness and creative world building.
This page was last updated on 11 February 2025
