Shame, Techne and Embodied Translation in Lara Foot’s Tshepang: The Third Testament

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the techne of performance aesthetics in Lara Foot’s play Tshepang: The Third Testament (2004) in relation to the emotion of shame and the question of how the performers and audience members deal with the emotion. How might we engage with and “translate” feelings of shame in relation to the events surrounding the rape of a nine-month-old baby in 2001, in Louisvale, South Africa? I show how an embodied, affective aesthetic can translate and thus “perform against” the culturally constructed body of the shamed and distant other, offering witnesses an opportunity to re/consider their entangled relations with the shamed Other. The discussion also provides the reader with an invitation to explore the performativity of their own embodied “translation” of certain “shamed” bodies. This bears upon notions of “the gaze”, power, abjection, the distant other and affective attachment.