The lights go down, people settle. A violin starts to play. Stage left, an elderly man walks onstage, alone, in a suit and tie, wearing a hat. This is John Cartwright, aged just 87 - The Performer. In this episode, we consider what performance means – on life as performance, and performance as life. How performance brings us alive, stretches us and helps us to grow. Punctuated by his poetry, John Cartwright provides a meditation on ageing, on the body, on movement, and what it means to be alive in this world. A refraction from within the kernel of a particular existence, turned outward and inward, shared. A mirror of life and death. The lights dim, the curtain closes… we applaud. We shuffle out, head our separate ways, holding the memory of the experience. We’re reflecting on what things mean. On who we love, and how we might do better. The stars in our own little life show, silently reciting our lines. Perhaps we sense a flickering curtain. Or can register the fading light. Or perhaps we’re entirely unaware that this is it, that life is no rehearsal…
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The lights go down, people settle. A violin starts to play. Stage left, an elderly man walks onstage, alone, in a suit and tie, wearing a hat. This is John Cartwright, aged just 87 - The Performer. In this episode, we consider what performance means – on life as performance, and performance as life. How performance brings us alive, stretches us and helps us to grow. Punctuated by his poetry, John Cartwright provides a meditation on ageing, on the body, on movement, and what it means to be alive in this world. A refraction from within the kernel of a particular existence, turned outward and inward, shared. A mirror of life and death. The lights dim, the curtain closes… we applaud. We shuffle out, head our separate ways, holding the memory of the experience. We’re reflecting on what things mean. On who we love, and how we might do better. The stars in our own little life show, silently reciting our lines. Perhaps we sense a flickering curtain. Or can register the fading light. Or perhaps we’re entirely unaware that this is it, that life is no rehearsal…
In this fascinating episode, Warrant Officer Stephné Le Roux of the South African Police Service (SAPS) provides intimate detail of her work identifying skeletal remains. Frequently, this means determining whether these are perhaps from an ancient burial site or a more recent crime scene. In a country where endemic violence and poverty, migration, substance abuse and other factors tear families apart, many of our dead are unidentified, unclaimed. What is the story they tell?
Stephné discusses the challenges she faces, sharing good ideas to improve the systems that often make her work so challenging. With consistent humour and modesty, she shares detail of the techniques she uses to analyse human remains, and speaks candidly of how her work has influenced her attitude to life.
How To Die
The lights go down, people settle. A violin starts to play. Stage left, an elderly man walks onstage, alone, in a suit and tie, wearing a hat. This is John Cartwright, aged just 87 - The Performer. In this episode, we consider what performance means – on life as performance, and performance as life. How performance brings us alive, stretches us and helps us to grow. Punctuated by his poetry, John Cartwright provides a meditation on ageing, on the body, on movement, and what it means to be alive in this world. A refraction from within the kernel of a particular existence, turned outward and inward, shared. A mirror of life and death. The lights dim, the curtain closes… we applaud. We shuffle out, head our separate ways, holding the memory of the experience. We’re reflecting on what things mean. On who we love, and how we might do better. The stars in our own little life show, silently reciting our lines. Perhaps we sense a flickering curtain. Or can register the fading light. Or perhaps we’re entirely unaware that this is it, that life is no rehearsal…
