Jane Taylor

Jane Taylor (born 19 April 1956) is a South African writer, playwright and academic. She currently holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She is the director of the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects (LoKO), a Centre for the theoretical and material exploration of the Subject/Object continuum. The Centre engages in performance arts as well as research and intellectual enquiry into the human and technological interface, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Intelligent Amplification (IA). Her recent performance/lecture “Ne’er So Much the Ape” [which takes its title from an old English adage, ‘ne’er so much the Ape as when he wears the doctor’s cape’] explores the articulation of primate research, race theory, AI, and performance theory. In 1987 she and David Bunn co-edited From South Africa (University of Chicago Press), an anthology which documents the Years of Emergency in the last decade of Apartheid in that country, through new photography, graphics, literature and in 1994 she and David Bunn curated the exhibition "Displacements" at the Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Illinois, and in 1996, she curated "Fault Lines," an exhibition at Cape Town Castle on truth and reconciliation. "Fault Lines" was also, more broadly, a series of cultural responses which she initiated in order to draw artists from the international community into exploring the discourses and practices of Truth and Reconciliation. She has written about Jarry's Pere Ubu and she also wrote the playtext of "Ubu and the Truth Commission" with artist/director William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company. In 2001 she wrote the libretto for The Confessions of Zeno for Kentridge and Handspring. She has recently edited Handspring Puppet Company (David Krut publishers, 2009), a substantial study of this world-renowned South African performance troupe. Taylor was a co-editor of Refig