Stephen Joel Chifunyise and his contribution to the praxis of Afroscenology

Abstract

In this article, I want to explore the life and creative practice of Stephen Chifunyise to assemble a couple of features that characterize his work which he called ‘national theatre’. My starting point is that all theory is derived from practice and comes back to guide practice. By interrogating Chifunyise’s training manuals, plays, speeches, academic papers, workshop materials, contributions to newspapers and his own practice, certain trends begin to emerge which speak to a normative practice that many theatre groups/companies in Zimbabwe deployed. Within the context of this creative practice, many other African nations were grappling with the idea of a national theatre before and after Zimbabwe’s search for a theatre identity. All these African countries were foregrounding an indigenous text, usually storytelling, as the theatrical frame to which other texts and codes could be grafted to create an African aesthetic. Despite the cultural diversity of sub-Saharan Africa, there seems to be an agreement on the general framework of theatre. In this article, I have called the theory which emerged from this practice, Afroscenology. As different scholars contribute different tenets to the same theory, my underlying objective is to spell out Chifunyise’s contribution to the theory of Afroscenology.