The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre and Imagining the Edgy City: Writing, Performing, and Building Johannesburg, by Loren Kruger (review) (original) (raw)

The Larger Stages: The 'Becoming Minor' of South African Theatres

2020

South Africa is layered with entangled histories that have created a fragile landscape of ambiguities where fractured memories are revealed yet remain concealed. The social architecture of apartheid still persists in a legacy of hostile urban geographies and land inequity, while global capitalism and economic disparity are seen in the dramatic contrast between the developing middle class and the poverty of millions. This research project interrogates the way in which contemporary theatre in South Africa is implicated in the country's complex cultural, economic and social realities. Pursuing rigorous qualitative research in the history, practice and criticism of South African theatre; contemporary studies in theatre spatiality; and philosophy, cultural theory and human geography, I explore precisely whose voices are being heard and which audiences are being reached. What role does-and might-theatre play in addressing South Africa's socioeconomic and artistic challenges, both as a barrier and a bridge to audiences? Drawing on the work of such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Rosi Braidotti and Achille Mbembe, can we anticipate what we might describe as a 'minor' theatre that will tell the stories that resonate twenty years after the end of apartheid? The term 'minor' refers to the Deleuzian concept of affirmative and dynamic processes to create new political subjects; processes of "becoming" that break from the fixed, proscribed "being," which in the South African context has been created by centuries of colonialism and decades of state-imposed racial construction. Given the insights afforded by such theorization, I argue that the spaces of performance are potentially dynamic spaces of 3 intersection within this landscape of layered socioeconomic and artistic challenges created by a milieu of rooted physical and mental boundaries that have informed the country's inherited theatrical practices.

Historicizing anglophone theater in postcolonial South Africa: select political and protest plays

International Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies

This article explores the ways in which Anglophone dramas in postcolonial South Africa became a tool of political and protest theater. It examines the emergence of Anglophone theater, explores its development into political praxis and discusses the performance or non-performance contexts, as well as their specific socio-political milieux, with reference to the select plays from South Africa. These plays are compelling as they characterize specific tensions internal to South Africa, while alluding to colonial legacies and global coercion. Historicization is a crucial phase in this study and the key part of the methodology that establishes their political and aesthetic significance, both at the time of performance and after. The central argument of the article is that Anglophone theater of South Africa is subjected to and bound bysocio-political and cultural dynamics of the country; the emergence of political and protest theater is often caused by subtle or overt subterfuges of biopolitics exercised internally within this postcolonial territory.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography

2020

The objective to set up archives dedicated to collecting, collating, and researching performance practices in post-independence India, in order to rewrite colonial histories with a vision for the future, was a project initiated by the new state, then subsequently forgotten. However, this is an apt entry point to open up critical debates about how the post-colonial euphoria urged new scholarship and how, at the core of this, theatre and performance practices would be redefi ned. In tracing the history and politics of discourses around performativity and theatricality in the United States and Europe, Janelle Reinelt draws attention to the fact that the applications of the terms theatre and performance resonate with "local struggles" and enable "a challenge to these discourses in light of an increasingly urgent imperative to think and resituate performance theory in relation to our contemporary transnational situation" (2002 , 201). She argues that theatre and performance are not mere linguistic distinctions but are rooted in diff erent conceptual foundations with political implications. In post-colonial contexts, particularly in India, debates have focused on the dichotomy of theatre as a colonial import along with a wide range of heterogeneous local practices referred to as performance. Reviving, recovering, and archiving performances was therefore a much-anticipated and pedagogic post-colonial project of rewriting histories. As has become apparent, this was not merely in the realm of idealism, but ultimately had long-term implications for the discipline of theatre and performance studies in the Indian as well as other post-colonial contexts. Thus, in view of the colonial experience and its aftermath, the binary of theatre and performance collapsed into reductive categories layered with diff erent meanings than the ones prevalent in Western academies. This aff ected the course of the discipline in India and provoked crucial debates around secularism vis-à-vis communitarianism. Signifi cant in this context, I argue, was an intervention in the original binary perspectives, which often extended or changed meanings. The idea behind landmark debates is the hypothesis that while theatre histories can be researched and written, the study of performance practices cannot follow the critical historical method that is widely practised in the discipline. Instead, ethnography was seen as the means to research, archive, and write on performance practices. Meanwhile, theatre, which continued

Tipping Points in the History of Academic Theatre and Performance Studies in South Africa

Theatre Research International, 2010

This article considers fi v e tipping points or phases in the dev elopm ent of m odern theatre studies in South A frica. It b eg ins w ith the period from 1925 to 1935, a tim e w hen the fi rst m ajor theatre history appeared, a fully fl edg ed (W estern) theatre sy stem w as estab lished and the A frican theatre tradition w as recog niz ed. It details 194 5 to 1962 for the estab lishm ent of a coherent professional theatre sy stem , the fi rst state-funded theatre com pany and the fi rst dram a departm ents. Thereafter, 1970 to 1985 is identifi ed as the m ost sig nifi cant period in relation to the political strug g le for lib eration in South A frica, w hile the last tw o phases (1988-94 and 1997-9) under consideration are characteriz ed b y an increase in research output and b y the need for practitioners and com m entators to seek reconciliation and healing throug h theatre and perform ance.