The Dark Continent: «African Tales by Shakespeare» and the Experience of Transitional Community

Dorota Sosnowska

doi:10.36744/pt.815

Abstract

This text is an analysis of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s 2011 production, African Tales by Shakespeare, tracing the project of community taken up in the performance. The central thesis takes this to be neither a national community nor a dispersed, intersectional coalition, as Bryce Lease has formulated the difference between Polish political and traditional theater, but rather a transitional community—unstable, unsuccessful, and rooted in the experience of political transition. The author, by invoking references to the visual arts present in the performance, points to other community projects emerging from the experience of transition while showing how, when appropriated for the purposes of performance, their meanings change radically. In the masculine, phallic, and violent world of African Tales, art and philosophy born of the experience of femininity are lost, twisted, and forgotten. Among the most important threads of analysis, however, is the way racialization and racism function in the play. From this perspective, the problematic status of the community the play establishes is most clearly seen: as a community of phantasmic, aspirational, transitional whiteness

Highlights

I propose to change the perspective in analyzing African Tales—not as a failed attempt to establish a critical, heterogenous, and coalitional public engaged in problems of exclusion, unsuccessful in this attempt due to the “lack of critical discourses on race and racial masquerade in the Polish cultural field,”12 as Lease attributes the apparent indifference of domestic theater critics to the subject
After African Tales’ premiere in Liège in October 2011, the production traveled to Poland, for Nowy Teatr’s performances in December
It means that the community arising from touching the shame finds itself a mirror image of Western politics and Western society that places its experience within the logic of transition described by Buden as a “teological process determined by its goal and consisting of climbing the democratic scale till its top.”33 The steps are strictly determined by what has already happened in Western history

Summary

African Tales by Shakespeare and the Experience of Transitional Community

When we grasp the speech of the existential object, being is communicated in the existential community, which itself is revealed as a value. I propose to change the perspective in analyzing African Tales—not as a failed attempt to establish a critical, heterogenous, and coalitional public engaged in problems of exclusion, unsuccessful in this attempt due to the “lack of critical discourses on race and racial masquerade in the Polish cultural field,” as Lease attributes the apparent indifference of domestic theater critics to the subject. I will show that Othello and Shylock, Lear and Cordelia, Desdemona, and Portia do not gain any agency or their own voices in the production, as otherness remains subsumed to strangeness This materializes in the former’s black makeup, and in theatrical images of violence, sexuality, and cruelty, all of which are framed in the offensive, connoting the impassably foreign metaphor of Africa. As I will argue, it is necessary to look at theater in the context of art and through the prism of thinking about impossible community: of imagining, dreaming of, fearing, willing toward change, embodying, and experiencing it

Black Desert

Transitional Images

CSW Zamek Ujazdowski

DOROTA SOSNOWSKA