'Peeling the Wound': Dramaturgies of haunting on the neo-apartheid stage (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
The dissertation Topographies of Cruelty: Radical Performances in South African and British Theatre, maps physical, social, political, aesthetic, and psychological landscapes of cruelty performed on the body, in the imaginary, in language, in performers, and on the stages through radical theatre performances. By identifying and locating the forms, features, and functions of cruelty employed in the selected plays, this dissertation aims to provide a valuable contribution to the field of literary and cultural studies and to discourses on global violence, crisis, and oppression, the power of literature, and the human capacity for kindness in the face of terror. It also attempts to investigate forms of cruelty in South African and in British theatre on equal terms, thereby countering the hegemonic Eurocentric bias by taking a decolonial, feminist stance. The radical performances investigated in this doctoral thesis render extreme acts of cruelty and confront their readers and audiences, as witnesses, with actually exercised or experienced pain and violence. Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998), Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse (1980) and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003) deal with psychological cruelty, verbal cruelty, and cruelty in the imagination. Yaël Farber’s A Woman in Waiting (1999), Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise (2000), and He Left Quietly (2002), as well as Lara Foot’s Tshepang: The Third Testament (2005), in turn, negotiate extraordinary and ordinary acts of cruelty as well as life-in-crisis on stage as a conscious mode of giving testimony to committed atrocities and inflicted trauma in recent South African history. The performances #JustMen (2018), a South African workshop play against gender-based violence, and Mojisola Adebayo’s The Interrogation of Sandra Bland (2017), a theatrical response to the Black Lives Matter movement, are both collective activist pieces advocating for social and political change.
The “Ordinary” Cruelty and the Theatre as Witness in Four South African Plays
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2020
This essay looks at how four contemporary South African plays use performance to render, address, and acknowledge personal and national trauma. By staging acts of cruelty that happen as “ordinary” experience, as perpetual pain, or as representation of life-in-crisis, these plays not only question and complement the national narrative by telling stories that have not found a stage or a listener before, but they also inform and speak to topical societal issues in South Africa such as that of apathy to violence and the question of complicity. Yael Farber and Lara Foot employ a distinctly South African theatre language that draws on theatrical concepts of the European avant-garde, especially those of Antonin Artaud, as well as on the tradition of oral storytelling and ritual to render cruelty as the “ordinary” and crisis as an ongoing condition in the sociohistorical context of apartheid and the apartheid-influenced post-1994 world. By excavating, tracing, and acknowledging “ordinary” c...
Performing Asylum: Theatre of Testimony in South Africa. , 2017
The use of testimonies in performance is enjoying increased artistic and critical popularity and has a long and rich tradition on South African stages. Both internationally and locally, emerging and established playwrights working on migration and refugee issues are seeking to incorporate the testimony of asylum seekers into their work. This necessitates a critical reflection of the influences that shape and structure the staging of these testimonies. This study argues that increased migration and the growing number of asylum seekers arriving on South African shores, has motivated at times violent interaction between host communities and the newcomers. These incidents have inspired a distinct trend of testimonial performances around the concept of asylum. This study uses narrative analysis to read examples of contemporary theatre of testimony plays that examine this phenomenon. It examines how playwright positioning informs the structuring of asylum testimonies on stage, in addition to contextualizing the ethical and moral complexities the playwright’s positionality places on their practice. Through three case studies, the study interrogates how playwright positioning informs notions of authorship, authenticity, truth, theatricality and ethics. Furthermore, it investigates the challenges that speaking for ‘self’ and speaking for the ‘other’ place on testimonial playwrights. http://www.ascleiden.nl/news/performing-asylum-theatre-testimony-south-africa
Performance of wit(h)nessing : trauma and affect in contemporary live art
2011
This thesis investigates traumatic affectivity and a complex mesh of artistic strategies in contemporary live art and performance that allow a certain material renegotiation and transformation of social and personal traumatic histories. These strategies are analysed not as means of interpersonal transmission of experience through narrative capture and consolation, but of a transmission of affect, where the sense of affective sharing, of 'wit(h)nessing' and 'transmissibility' of (traumatic) affect is distinguished from the idea of identification, of mirroring, of emotional identification that in fact subsumes the other to the same, to a life as we can readily articulate and regulate it without needing to acknowledge the violence inherent in such articulations. The thesis also explores how the notion of dramaturgy changes when observed from the perspective of trauma. Dramaturgy is here understood as 'the text (the weave) of the performance' , where performance is seen to encompass a wide range of artistic practices which involve some element of live or recorded performed action. Such definition of dramaturgy becomes especially significant when this text/weave is marked by a traumatic occurrence, which by definition damages, tears down its integrating fabric. How can we address the difficulty, physically and philosophically, of accessing a destructive event through a creative act? As one possible answer, the thesis proposes the notion of 'dramaturgies of loss' , of a certain 'melancholy' or 'traumatic' text as a creative answer to the forces of violence. It argues that an awkward, uncomfortable presence of certain misplaced, 'emptied' mimetic forms of contemporary dance and performance can be seen to create a parallel topography that can retroact on accepted notions of culture and render what belongs inside or outside of the cultural sphere indeterminate and thus potentially open to change.
Zoë Wicomb’s novel David’s Story responds to the traumatic conditions of racism, the psychology of the traumatized individual and to the (failed) ‘collective therapy’ of the TRC, which aimed at integrating the trauma suffered under apartheid in a national narrative of reconciliation and progress. Wicomb points out the gaps in the national project of coping with trauma, and complements the ‘monologic’ kind of historiography harnessed by the NP and the ANC by perspectives neglected in their versions of the recent past. The writer does not aim at a transparent imitation of disruptive trauma in an art of commitment, which might invite voyeuristic indulgence in horror or re-traumatize readers. She shuns linear narrative and closure, which would allow for detachment and the return to the ordinary. Wicomb deliberately replays trauma in dialogic aesthetics, which foregrounds the process of negotiating the past and its disruption by trauma. Her self-reflexive explorations of ‘sharing’ trauma reveal the difficulties -- for the traumatized individual as well as for the various groups affected in different ways by trauma -- of coming to terms with the past. I will locate the conditions of trauma in the discursive framework of monologic ideologies and its practices, which have a potentially harmful impact on the bodies and the selves of individuals and groups singled out for discrimination and repression.
Performance Paradigm, 2020
I Stand Corrected (Adebayo & Nyamza) provides an opportunity to think through Black agency as refusal in performance, via an aesthetic of ambiguity and complicity. From the vantage point of the trash can, these two performers offer moments of what Mojisola Adebayo calls “revolutionary hope” (2015), staging a beautiful, unlikely marriage between the zombie body and the surviving woman. I also engage with photography by queer 'visual activist' Zanele Muholi. In their introduction to a special issue on feminist theory and the global South, Celia Roberts and Raewyn Connell say: “theory is normally produced in the metropole and exported to the periphery, while the periphery normally produces data and exports this raw material to the metropole” (2016, 134-135). Although this perspective forms part of a move towards producing theory of the South, I posit that theorising with and alongside performance in particular enables us to destabilise some assumptions of meaningfulness and the knowledge economy. Within this epistemic split (often understood between theory and practice) it is not only the theorist – divorced from the body and in my case, located outside of my home country (South Africa) – that produces knowledge outside embodied experience (being, doing, seeing). The contested, often ambiguous nature of knowing can be foregrounded in and by performance in particular and distinctive ways. This article therefore seeks to mobilise performance analysis towards Southern epistemologies.
How to represent the Holocaust, a historical experience that largely exceeds our imagination, on stage? In its seminal performance Kamp, the Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern addresses this question by literally restaging the experience of Auschwitz on a miniature scale. Kamp is not just a simple attempt to commemorate a particularly painful episode in our recent Western history, the performance makes the spectator think about what we experience as ‘real’ in this recollection and, at the same time, how this memory is determined by various cultural conventions. This self-reflexive perspective, I will argue, is a truly baroque strategy. In this article I will therefore return to the religious wars at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. There, too, concrete violent historical circumstances led to a fundamentally violent theatrical imagination, to a spectacular ‘theatre of the real’. At the same time, this theatre simultaneously put itself, or rather the idea of theatrical representation itself, at stake. It is this meta-perspective that makes it possible not only to show the unbearable, but also to understand the constructed nature of historical memory.
This dissertation explores four recent examples of video art by four South African women artists. It focuses on Jo Ractliffe’s Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting) [1999/2000], Berni Searle’s Mute (2008), Penny Siopis’ Obscure White Messenger (2010) and Minnette Vári’s Chimera (the white edition, 2001 and the black edition 2001-2002). I consider the visual, sonic, temporal, durational, spatial, sensory and affective capacities of these works, and their encounter with historical events/episodes and figures the significance and affective charge of which move across the eras differentiated as apartheid and post-apartheid. I seek to contribute to critiques of the post-apartheid democracy, and the impetus to move forward from the past, to forgive and reconcile its violence, while not actively and critically engaging historical trauma, and its relation to memory. Each of the videos engaged enter into a dialogue with historical narratives embedded within the experience and memory of violence and racial oppression in South Africa. The study is concerned with the critical significance and temporality of memory in relation to trauma as a historical and psychoanalytical concept applicable to ongoing conditions of historical and political violence and its continuous, apparently irresolvable repetition in political-historical life. This inquiry is underpinned by art historical approaches to the relationship between art and trauma, and, in particular, the work of Jill Bennett (2005) and Griselda Pollock (2013). It is concerned primarily with Bennett and Pollock’s privileging, from their particular theoretical perspectives, of the affects and internal logics/worlds of art objects, which prompt critical thought, and theoretical and historical inquiry. The particular temporality of video is engaged through historical and psychoanalytical concepts of trauma. The videos selected for this dissertation suggest ideas of temporal and spatial disorientation, displacement, collapse, and irresolvable repetitive return. The opacity that characterises the works is a major point of emphasis, and is related to the dissertation’s concern with trauma, racial oppression and historical/epistemic violence. A major concern is how artists and scholars enter into dialogues with history, from the perspectives of their own subjectivities, without reinscribing historical and epistemic violence, and the objectification of marginalised subjects. Situated within the parameters of feminist ethics the study foregrounds women artists. I argue for an ethics that takes into account self-reflexivity, and the artist’s, and the scholar’s, situated relationship to history, in the aftermath of sustained historical racial oppression and authoritarianism. It considers the possibilities of art objects as sites that facilitate empathetic, critical and intellectually engaged encounters with historical trauma and violence in South Africa. The videos explored counter spectacle and didactic, and authoritarian, modes of representation. In the absence of a sustained and visible art historical narrative of the history of video art in South Africa, the study focuses on work representative of the earliest, documented examples of video art by women artists, which emerge out of the transition from apartheid. The tension between history’s relationship to objectivity, detachment and empirical knowledge, and its participation in subjective, imaginary, and performative processes underpins the study.