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This book explores the place of memory in post-apartheid South Africa by analysing state sanctioned-performances of the nation. It first explores how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) archive was created, and what it means to contemporary South Africa. The book then explores creative responses to the TRC. It examines individual narratives that have become iconic; asking why these have been chosen to represent the experiences of the broader majority. It analyses how contemporary cultural practitioners are particularly exploring various non-realistic, highly performative forms in conjunction with verbatim narratives to reflect on diverse lived realities in South Africa. The inherited apartheid archives embody particular narratives of South Africa, especially those that defined separate cultural identities, with their relative worth and histories. The way these archives of memory were constructed and controlled is important, especially insofar as they affected the social structure of the nation, beyond apartheid legislation. The book looks at how at moments of political crisis or transition, specific narratives of history, from particular cultural perspectives, have been performed in public spaces to define national identities. It also explores how Mbeki used the South Africa-Mali project, within the context of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) to extend the imagined boundaries of the nation. Finally, the book explores contemporary popular performance and theatrical engagements with history and memory.
compares with how other African countries have approached rewriting their history in the post-colonial context (Neale, 1985). This project takes its starting point from Desmond Tutu’s formulation of post-apartheid South Africa as the ‘rainbow nation’, a formulation that was elaborated on by Mandela (1995) in his first month of office. It was adopted by the ANC as the political symbol of unity for a 134 South African performance and archives of memory country of diverse and divided people. This chapter explores how Mbeki used the South Africa–Mali project, within the
Afrikaner nationalism in and through the 1938 Voortrekker Festival and the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument in 1949; some references to the 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival Fair and the 1988 commemoration of the Great Trek will supplement this analysis. The chapter then compares the renegotiation of the meaning of the 92 South African performance and archives of memory Voortrekker Monument as a site of memory in the post-apartheid context with Freedom Park, which is twinned with this Monument. In particular it looks at how the past is being
state-subsidised venues also allows for different kinds of relationships with audiences, beyond the tendency for passive consumption encouraged by a proscenium arch design. This is especially evident in festivals such as Cape Town’s Infecting the City (2008–11),1 which Awelani Moyo argues ‘has 1 See interview with Bailey on ITC (2010b). 172 South African performance and archives of memory attempted to make the arts more widely available to the public whilst stimulating debate about current social issues by making use of the embodied energy and creativity of
sessions throughout the country from 1996 to 1998, covering the period from 1960 to 1990. The material from the Commission was reviewed and collated into a seven-volume Final Report, the last of which entered the public domain in 2003. William Kentridge referred to the TRC as ‘exemplary civic theatre, a public 2 South African performance and archives of memory hearing of private griefs which are absorbed into the body politic as a part of the deeper understanding of how the society arrived at its present position’ (1998: ix). This public event challenged many
this period resulted in violence and 24 South African performance and archives of memory human rights abuses from all sides. No section of society escaped these abuses’.2 Although South Africa had successfully negotiated the handover to a fully democratic government, the country was uneasy, divided, without a coherent or consensual sense of the past. This needed to be redressed, insofar as the articulation of a shared past is central to the conceptualising of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991) and the formulation of a nation (McLeod, 2000). Alex Boraine
and political story out of this unruly multivocality’ (Coplan, 2000: 138). These challenges have been made in fiction and non-fiction prose as well as in performances, which to date include Mike van Graan’s Dinner Talk (1996) and Green Man Flashing (first performed 2004), PieterDirk Uys’s Truth Omissions (1996), Paul Herzberg’s The Dead Wait (1997), Walter Chakela’s Isithukuthu (1997), Nan Hamilton’s No. 4 56 South African performance and archives of memory (1997), André Brink’s Die Jogger (The Jogger, 1997), Jane Taylor and the Handspring Puppet Company’s Ubu
This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from the spectacle of the Paralympics Opening Ceremony to Broadway musicals, from experimental contemporary performance and opera to educational theatre, Somali poetic drama and grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. It documents important examples of collaborative practice with extended discussion of the Theatre of Debate process developed by Y Touring theatre company, exploration of bilingual theatre-making in East London and an account of how grime MCs and dermatologists ended up making a film together in Birmingham. The interdisciplinary approach draws on contemporary research in theatre and performance studies in combination with key ideas from science studies. It shows how theatre can offer important perspectives on what the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has called ‘cosmopolitics’. The book argues that theatre can flatten knowledge hierarchies and hold together different ways of knowing.
Responding to the resurgence of verbatim theatre that emerged in Britain, Australia, the United States and other parts of the world in the early 1990s, this book offers one of the first sustained, critical engagements with contemporary verbatim, documentary and testimonial dramaturgies. Offering a new reading of the history of the documentary and verbatim theatre form, the book relocates verbatim and testimonial theatre away from discourses of the real and representations of reality and instead argues that these dramaturgical approaches are better understood as engagements with forms of truth-telling and witnessing. Examining a range of verbatim and testimonial plays from different parts of the world, the book develops new ways of understanding the performance of testimony and considers how dramaturgical theatre can bear witness to real events and individual and communal injustice through the re-enactment of personal testimony. Through its interrogation of different dramaturgical engagements with acts of witnessing, the book identifies certain forms of testimonial theatre that move beyond psychoanalytical accounts of trauma and reimagine testimony and witnessing as part of a decolonised project that looks beyond event-based trauma, addressing instead the experience of suffering wrought by racism and other forms of social injustice.
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.