African Theatre Research Articles

Intercultural Mediation and Sundry Obstacles in African Theatre: Sunnie Ododo’s 𝐻𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝐶ℎ𝑜𝑖𝑐𝑒 as a Paradigm

Intercultural Mediation and Sundry Obstacles in African Theatre: Sunnie Ododo’s 𝐻𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝐶ℎ𝑜𝑖𝑐𝑒 as a Paradigm

Jane Plastow, A History of East African Theatre, I: Horn of Africa

Book review.

Scars of a Colonial History

Central to virtually any indictment of South African literature, its historiography, or otherwise culturally and politically influenced modes of representation persist themes of social, political, and racial inequality. That is not to say that all South African cultural productions revolve around a centrifuge of racially focused social commentary; rather, that when historicizing a work of South African aesthetics such themes inevitably arise because of the nation’s colonial history and the Eurocentrism that have pervaded its modern socio-political foundations. When examining South African aesthetic/cultural representations (in this case, a literary text) it is thus crucial to properly locate the work in as full a historical context as possible. My research therefore aims to link South Africa’s history of colonization with the damaged race relations that ensued in the twentieth century as represented in a prominent work of South African theater: Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” … And the Boys. My essay traverses the history of British and Dutch colonization in South Africa and seeks therein to register foundations for the Eurocentric, whitewashed ideologies which would eventually translate into official state policy in 1948 and which precipitated the broken race relations that Fugard’s semi-autobiographical play interrogates. I discuss Fugard’s depiction of white privilege while systematically linking such representations back to their colonial foundations, and ultimately assess Fugard’s play as a condemnation of white supremacy and as a plea for the recalibration of prejudiced racial hierarchies.

Blackface on the South African Stage

In most contemporary studies in which the practice of blackface is discussed, it is seen as a controversial and racist practice. While many studies are available globally on different aspects of this practice (e.g., origin and history, the broad spectrum of media where it is used, different permutations and developments of this practice in various countries, etc.), one finds only a few studies focused on the use and practice of blackface in South African theatre studies. This is surprising when one considers the major role played by race in the general history of South Africa, as well as more specifically within the history of South African theatre. The focus in this article is on the practice and occurrence of blackface on the South African English stage from a historical theatre viewpoint as framed within a postcolonial perspective of this topic. Although one can assert that the practice of blackface was probably simply taken from the origin of this practice in the United States and mainly introduced to South Africa via travelling minstrel troupes from America and travelling theatre companies from the United Kingdom, it is important to see how this practice was received in colonial South Africa. The discussion will first address the use of this practice within early English theatre in South Africa as influenced by the blackface minstrelsy travelling troupes of the 19th century (1830s to 1870s), while the second part of the article will focus on the use of blackface by white actors on the South African stage to portray black characters in the early 20th century (1910 to 1930s).

Passion or profession: the training of theatre directors in South Africa

This article explores director training in the context of contemporary South Africa. Through individual interviews with ten South African theatre directors, we explore their origins and inspirations towards becoming a director. The selected directors differ in their ways of working and their personal backgrounds, providing a diverse spectrum of profiles that highlight the different skills required by theatre directors. Together, these interviews reflect the reality of the theatre industry in South Africa, which is somewhat haphazard and fragmented. The interviews explore how most of the selected directors, working across the spectrum of formal, well-funded theatre and under-resourced, community-based theatre, have fallen into directing as a default position, rather than receiving specific directing training during their studies. In most cases, this has been born out of a necessity to create their own work as actors, or to produce their own scripts as writers. This practice reflects how South African theatre directors are often driven by their own passion rather than by the professional training provided for directors in other countries. Based on these experiences, and the needs within the theatre industry in South Africa, the article concludes with suggestions for curriculum reform for theatre directors in the context of the South.

Audience and the transformation of performance in African theatre through Iredi War and Ekuechi festival

African theatre encompasses theatrical practices that predate European colonization. Using Sam Ukala's play, Iredi War, a modern Nigerian drama infused with folk elements, and the Ekuechi festival of Nigeria's Ebira people, this qualitative study examined audience participation and the transformation of performance in African theatre, with insights from Segun Adefila, a renowned Nigerian theatre practitioner. It employed Sam Ukala’s (1996). Folkism: towards a national aesthetic principle for Nigerian dramaturgy. New Theatre Quarterly, 12 (47), 279–287) theory of ‘Folkism’ as its theoretical framework, and observed that the distinction between the spectator and actor can be clear or fluid, depending on the flow of the performance, with participants exchanging roles and playing space. In this context, audience members may act as spectators, actors, or both, reflecting the communal nature of African theatre. Other elements of African theatre include the festival theatre technique, in which the audience encircles the performance area in traditional performances, and the processional staging technique that involves moving with performers between venues. This immersive experience further engages the participant-audience, emphasizing their active involvement in the theatrical event. Moreover, African theatre serves dual purposes as both ritual and entertainment, and as Adefila argues, the position of the audience in relation to the central playing space, or nucleus, influences the nature of the performance. As spectators move away from the nucleus, the emphasis shifts towards entertainment, whereas proximity to the nucleus transforms the performance into a more ritualistic or worshipful event. While Adefila's audience model serves as a base, it oversimplifies audience experience, overlooks distant audience agency, and focuses on religious performances. Hence, the need for a more nuanced framework for African traditional theatre.

African Metaphysics, Epistemology and a New Logic: A Decolonial Approach to Philosophy, by Jonathan O. Chimakonam and L. Uchenna Ogbonnaya

<i>African Metaphysics, Epistemology and a New Logic: A Decolonial Approach to Philosophy</i>, by Jonathan O. Chimakonam and L. Uchenna Ogbonnaya

LINGUISTIC REVITALISATION AND THE DRAMA IN AFRICAN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES

This paper explores the drama written in indigenous African languages across many countries in Africa. It highlights the intellectual snobbery suffered by drama written in indigenous languages, probing the reasons behind the critical marginalization. It equally probes the elemental compositions of drama written in indigenous languages, investigating how oral elements revitalize and fertilize the dramatic works. The theoretical framework for this study was anchored on Ethnodramatics, a theory of indigenous drama projected by Affiah and Osuagwu while the inspirations which substantiate indigenous African languages as viable and effective linguistic mediums for dramatic creativity are derived from Ngugi wa Thiongo’s theoretical postulation on the language of African theatre in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). The paper reveals that traditional African drama in indigenous languages creatively utilizes oral resources and elements such as proverbs, riddles, mime, music, songs, dance, and other folk arts in ways that embellish and relive their drama. The paper concludes that by writing in indigenous languages, playwrights expand the resources and frontiers of African indigenous languages, a situation that nurtures and preserves them.

Africa versus Europe: how the two British theatres compared 1914-1918

Although the African theatres of the First World War are receiving more attention than in the past, they are still relatively unknown. As in 1914-1918, the territories remain exotic side-shows for those interested in the main theatre of war, that in Europe, and for British researchers, it is the Western Front. This essay aims to alert readers to the similarities and differences between the British forces which served on the Western Front with those who served in the African theatres of 1914-1918, proving that “War is always hell. Only the setting changes.”

Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond by Catherine M. Cole

Reviewed by: Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond by Catherine M. Cole Carla Neuss Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond. By Catherine M. Cole. University of Michigan Press, 2020. Cloth: $85, Paper: $39.9. 304 pages. 18 illustrations. In her latest book, Catherine M. Cole turns to the role of dance in the ongoing wake of apartheid in South Africa. Situated within the failed promises of the post-apartheid era, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice centers dance performance by Black artists, an area of research that Cole notes is understudied within South African performance scholarship. In centering dance and live art, this book offers a new and compelling archive of performances that extends beyond the conventional, Eurocentric boundaries of theatre to consider how embodied and kinesthetic performance encounters express, challenge, and rewrite the postapartheid era. In bringing these performances to the fore, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice invites larger considerations of the role of dance, and nonverbal performance more broadly, in post- and decolonial contexts both within and beyond South Africa. Cole's introduction sets the stage for her analysis of specific South African practitioners and performances within the profound disillusionment that has followed the failed promises of Nelson Mandela's vision for a united "Rainbow Nation." The ongoing socioeconomic inequality and racial discrimination that characterizes Black South Africans' experience informs her readings of embodied performances that speak to the suspended progress of South Africa's twenty-eight-year democracy. Acknowledging that dance is a new field of analysis for her, Cole argues that this artistic medium offers potentialities untapped by contemporary South African theatre, which she describes as stuck in a "nostalgic trap" (7) of restaging "struggle classics" (8) produced during the apartheid era. Despite this critique of theatre, chapter 1 focuses on a play written by one of the foremost playwrights of the anti-apartheid struggle: Athol Fugard's oft-overlooked [End Page 99] Statements Before and After an Arrest under the Immorality Act, originally produced in 1972. Cole's evocative exegesis of the play's portrayal of a mixed-race couple conducting an illegal affair under apartheid's miscegenation laws demonstrates apartheid's coercive control of the body. This chapter usefully foregrounds the role of the body, which will come to define Cole's subsequent chapters on dance performance; a deeper engagement with the original production's use of blackface as a complicating factor in the play's racial politics, however, would have usefully presaged later chapters' troubling of white South African artists' attempts to perform allyship. Having established apartheid's embodied injustices as enacted through theatre, in chapter 2 Cole turns to contemporary artists of color Jay Pather, Mamela Nyamza, and Sello Pesa. In addressing the syncretic and entangled influences on their respective practices, Cole offers the lens of "delamination" as "a mode of deconstruction in which the material of the now… fractures in performance into separate layers," offering the "potential to separate valuable from toxic substances" (68). Cole's close reading of Mamela Nyamza's work, artistic genealogy, and intersectional positionality exemplifies this approach. As a Black, Christian lesbian trained in classical ballet, Nyamza is an artist who is navigating the conflicting impulses of liberation and stagnation that characterize South Africa's suspended revolution. In chapter 3 Cole more explicitly turns to questions of interculturalism in the work of Robyn Orlin and Brett Bailey, white South African artists who have garnered fame—and, at times, controversy—in Europe. Cole juxtaposes Orlin and Bailey's work with that of Indian-South African practitioner Jay Pather (who was also discussed in chapter 2) to unwind issues of cultural appropriation across all three artists' work. While pieces like Orlin's Daddy I've Seen This Piece Six Times Already and I Still Don't Know Why They're Hurting Each Other satirize the centering of the white artist-auteur, Cole argues that such pieces may inadvertently reify white supremacy. As an alternative, she positions Pather as having more successfully navigated intercultural aesthetics through his collaborative relationship with the Black performers of his dance company and his...

ÒGBÓJÚ ỌDẸ NÍNÚ IGBÓ IRÚNMỌLẸ̀ (THE FOREST OF A THOUSAND DAEMONS: A HUNTER’S SAGA) AND LÁNGBÒDÓ (THE INDESCRIBABLE MOUNT): PERFORMING CULTURE IN AFRICA

The study of theatre culture in Africa provides a significant background to reassess the emphasis on orthodox ideologies and influence of European aesthetics on the development of African theatre. The tradition of locating the worldview of dramatic characters within a culture which the audience within the culture can emphathise with is universal. And in most instances it is the misinformation about what is stylistically different across cultures that is instrumental in isolating non-Western people's experiences. Thus the contextualisation of D. O. Fágúnwà’s novel, Ògbójú Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmọlẹ̀, translated from the Yorùbá as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunters Saga by the Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, and Lángbòdó, the stage adaption whose title, Lángbòdó (The Indescribable Mount), is based on the wild locale at the heart of the hunter's adventure in Fágúnwà's novel by Wálé Ògúnyẹmí, within the system of Aláárìnjó the indigenous Yorùbá Travelling Theatre in West Africa, asserts culture as a performance space. The approach to understanding the concept of a theatre is to understand the art form which is characteristic of the culture. In the dramatic narrative of the hunter-narrator on a mission to the distant Mount Lángbòdó, Fágúnwà and Ògúnyẹ́mí capture the functional dimensions of indigenous people's theatres distinctive from European realities. This paper is an attempt to emphasise the importance of revisiting the definitions and developments of theatre along the backgrounds of indigenous cultures and theatrical arts such as Aláárìnjó as drawn from the selected works of the two Yorùbá writers.

“Through bush, across desert and over mountains”

Abstract During the Second World War, the East African theatre was marked by extreme variations in terms of climate, terrain, communications, and disease ecology. The planning, scope and conduct of the Allied offensive operations in the theatre was largely determined by the physical environment. The deployment of the 1st South African Infantry Brigade (1 sa Bde) to East Africa occurred across three distinct operational environments – the deserts of north-eastern Kenya, the bush country of Somalia, and the mountains of Ethiopia. The distinct changes in the physical environment influenced the combat operations of 1 sa Bde, which alternated between highly mobile, combined arms, operations across favourable terrain to somewhat static operations dominated by infantry and artillery over exceedingly difficult terrain. This article investigates the varied combat operations of 1 sa Bde in East Africa, and critically reflects on the influence that the physical environment exerted on the unfolding South African offensive operations.

Grond/Santekraam en bientang: Gesitueer in globale swart seeroetes

The Afrikaans poetry collections grond/Santekraam (2011) by Ronelda S. Kamfer and bientang (2020) by Jolyn Phillips both centralise the ocean and both deal with attempts at recovering repressed black histories. Apart from figuring as a source of spiritual fulfilment and connected to figures in the collection’s livelihoods, the ocean is represented in these collections as the bringer of European colonisers and of slaves to South Africa. In this article I contend that references to slavery and colonialism and the use of words in languages brought to South Africa through slave networks position these collections as products of the transnational Black Atlantic tradition, as theorised by Paul Gilroy. The fact that the narratives of both collections take place in the Overstrand region, near the meeting place of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, gives an indication of how Gilroy’s theory needs to be adapted to be applicable to Afrikaans literature: as many English-language South African theorists have argued, oceanic literary studies in South Africa should pay as much attention to routes in the Indian Ocean as to Atlantic routes. The emphasis in both collections on not only a history of slavery, but also one of the displacement of and violence against the people already inhabiting the area when colonisers alighted, further serves to indicate what an Afrikaans black aquatic literature looks like. When taking into account these differences between Afrikaans and other versions of black aquatic art, reading grond/Santekraam and bientang as part of a global black aesthetics allows the researcher to identify the ways in which these collections are characterised by a hermeneutics of suspicion (an interpretation of contemporary life that recognises the ways in which it is structured and functions in anti-black ways) and a hermeneutics of memory (an interpretation of this anti-black contemporary as a continuation of the history of the dehumanisation of black people).

Hamlet

Reviewed by: Hamlet Hassana Moosa Hamlet Presented by The Centre for Creative Arts, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, and Daniel Galloway Consulting, hosted at https://www.kknk.co.za/eng/hamlet/, in partnership with VR Theatrical, the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK), and the Tsikinya-Chaka Center. 31 May 2021. Adapted and directed by Neil Coppen, with translations by Buhle Ngaba and Fundile Majola. Technical production and design by Jaco van Rensburg and Wessel Odendaal. Soundscapes by Wessel Odendaal. With Anelisa Phewa (Hamlet), Buhle Ngaba (Ophelia), Rehane Abrahams (Laertes), Royston Stoffels (Polo-nius), Tony Bonyani Miyambo (Horatio), David Dennis (Claudius), Faniswa Yisa (Gertrude), Richard September (Rosencrantz/Osric), Jemma Kahn (Guildenstern), Tshego Khutsoane (Player King), Wiseman Sithole (Ghost/Gravedigger), and with stage directions read by Bianca Amato (narrator). Neil Coppen’s Hamlet was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa, which necessitated several lengthy national lockdowns that saw many of the country’s cultural institutions, like those in other parts of the world, deprived of social and financial support. The Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK) website, on which this one-off online reading was hosted, explains that Hamlet was due to run at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town in 2020, but with the onset of the pandemic and the resultant closure of the Fugard—a devastating loss to the South African theater world which broke the hearts of many—the production turned into an online reading. As a pandemic-influenced online production of Shakespeare in South Africa, the reading was not the first of its kind. In 2020, the ShakespeareZA project (reviewed in SB 38.3) supported the performances of a series of Shakespearean monologues presented online by actors from across South Africa. Like these earlier online performances, Coppen’s Hamlet proved to be a compelling demonstration of how digital mediums can be used to keep South African performances of Shakespeare alive in an unstable pandemic world. On entering the host website, audiences were met with two messages that were alternating against the black screen, which served as the backdrop for the play. The first message dutifully indicated that the actors and [End Page 139] IT team were in their respective homes preparing for the online reading to begin, while the second offered a witty cautionary note about both the temperamental nature of technology and the eeriness of the play ahead in the brief statement: “Anything can happen . . .” This strategy of communicating to the audience by using text on the black screen was employed throughout the reading to identify times and locations in the play. The start of the reading was accordingly signaled by the fading of the welcome messages, as the words “Prologue, The Funeral” were typed onto the screen. Before any actors appeared, the narrator set the scene for the reading by describing to us how these first moments of the play might have looked in a theater. Stage props included a faintly lit, “mounted Kudu head” hanging mid-air, and a “coffin dressed in a South African flag” positioned center stage. As the audience entered, they would have seen a gravedigger standing in a pit, smoking a cigarette, listening to “Zulu Gospel music” as he shoveled earth. The speaker proceeded to describe the emergence of the company of actors from the wings of the stage “dressed as dignitaries,” including “Kings, Chiefs, Government officials” and members of the “SADF” (South African Defence Force). Then, as the “house lights” dimmed, both men and women from the group on stage would have been singing and praying, and the characters of Gertrude, Hamlet, and Claudius would have become apparent from their position in the funeral procession. The narration spoken at the opening of the play made it clear that this was not simply going to be a reading of the original play-text, but also an imaginative “reading” of the theatrical performance originally envisioned by the director. The narrator became a fixed feature of the production and regularly embellished scenes with details of characters’ actions and settings. The set that audiences were invited to imagine in the prologue also highlighted the most defining feature of the production, namely its setting in contemporary South Africa. The Danish court...

'n Ou skoolsaal of teater - die opvoerruimtes van die Cape Flats Players en die Eoan-groep

Die teaternavorser Temple Hauptfleisch spreek in 1983 kommer uit oor die agteruitgang van plaaslike amateurteater. Hy identifiseer verskeie faktore om dit te stimuleer, onder meer die beskikbaarheid van 'n saal of 'n teater, verkieslik laasgenoemde, "omdat vir vandag se geso-fistikeerde gehore die ou skoolsaal nie meer goed genoeg is nie". Hierdie artikel ondersoek na aanleiding van hierdie stelling die lotgevalle van die Cape Flats Players en die Eoan-groep, beide Kaapse amateurgeselskappe tydens die hoogbloei van apartheid. Die beskikbaarheid van teatergeriewe en veral die toepassing van apartheidswetgewing met verwysing na die Wet op die Aanwysing van Aparte Geriewe en die Groepsgebiedewet, word van nader beskou. Die ondersoek vind plaas aan die hand van Michel Foucault, David Harvey en Henri Lefebvre se insigte oor die aard van plek en ruimte. Hier is bevind dat die Cape Flats Players nie toegang tot teaters gehad het nie; dat die toegang van gehore beperk was; dat hulle nie-tradisionele ruimtes moes gebruik; dat hulle geen beheer oor die aard en demografie van hulle gehore gehad het nie en dat hulle nuwe netwerke van verbandhoudende individue en groepe gevestig het. Ten opsigte van die Eoan-groep is bevind dat die apartheidswetgewing tot gevolg gehad het dat hul kulturele netwerk vernietig is. Ná die oprigting van hul eie teater, het hul onmiddellike gemeenskap die fasiliteit geboikot, hoofsaaklik vanweë die apartheidsregering se geldelike steun aan die groep. Die kontrasterende ervaring van die Cape Flats Players wat in 1991 in die voorheen "slegs blankes" Nico Malan-teater opgetree het, word bespreek. Alhoewel daar kritiek teen hul optrede was, het dit ook die einde van die boikot van die teaterkompleks ingelui. In die algemeen is bevind dat opvoerruimtes verbande oproep met ander ruimtes, geskiedenisse en simbole. Die keuse tussen "'n ou skoolsaal" en "'n teater" mag eenvoudig klink, maar verdoesel verwikkelde vrae oor ruimtes, toegang en uitsluiting.

African Theatre and Politics: The Evolution of Theatre in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe—A Comparative Study, by Jane Plastow

Book review

What I was Told: verbatim-physical theatre as feminist protest theatre in South Africa

Verbatim-physical theatre presents the possibility for women’s stories, not only to be told, but to be heard, interacted and engaged with. This article explores the combination of physical- and verbatim theatre for feminist protest theatre in South Africa. It argues that verbatim-physical theatre as feminist protest theatre presents a mode of storytelling that is challenging and oppositional through embodied and dynamic performances. It further makes the case that South African theatre is built on a long tradition of story-telling, is imbued with inherent physicality and has always been a strong means for political consciousness-raising and education. It is this nature of South African theatre that makes the combination of verbatim- and physical theatre so effective for feminist protest theatre. The article also analyses the creation and staging of What I was Told, a verbatim-physical theatre production telling the stories of women, the stories told to us and the stories that still need to be told.

Requiem: Roundtable on Tendayi Sithole's The Black Register

Abstract This special section of the issue offers a discussion of South African theorist Tendayi Sithole's book The Black Register (2020). The section's essays explore the stakes of Sithole's work as well as its implications. They unpack the book around questions of geography, historicity, and visual representation.

AESTHETIC DIMENSIONS OF OLA ROTIMI’S THEATRE

The study examines Ola Rotimi’s Theatre from both the literary and theatrical perspectives. The study contends that Ola Rotimi created/developed simplicity of style both in his playwriting and in theatre practice. The study also notes that Rotimi has created the drama and theatre of lasting quality through his knowledge of the culture and tradition of his people and his copious deployment of Para-linguistic aesthetics in his plays. Rotimi anchores all these on his knowledge of world theatre in his practice, thus creating the phenomenon of total theatre. The study concludes that the laws of the theatre are provisional and subject to change, derived from creativity and not from theory.KEYWORDS: Ola Rotimi, Aesthetic Dimensions, African Theatre, Playwriting, Para-linguistic aesthetics, Theatre Practice

An ecocritical reading of Victor Yankah‟s The Pretty Trees of Gakwana and Sikaman

The increasing environmental concerns of the 20th and 21st centuries have given rise to the term ecocriticism, a field of literary theory and criticism. In this paper, we examined two plays of Victor Yankah using some concepts from ecocriticism as an analytical framework. The paper is premised on the basis that the playwright shares a symbiotic relationship which has become a significant feature of the selected plays. Drawing from the eco-critical theory of ecocriticism and using two of his nature plays: The Pretty Trees of Gakwana and Sikaman, we intend to demonstrate Yankah‟s view and preoccupations about the mutual relationship between the human other and nature (the nonhuman other)-the natural world of environment with the view to prove the playwright‟s concern about the interference of human beings into the world of nature. This situation adversely results in the disruption of the symbiotic (human-nature) relationship. Yankah has presented both the epistemic and retributive forces of nature as well as raised concerns about the environment, ecological consciousness in advocating for ecological sustainability in modern African theatre and dramatic literature scholarship. Thus, the reading of Victor Yanka‟s selected plays adds to the relatively new and developing interest in environmental discourses on the African continent. To the extent that intrinsic features of nature are exhibited in his selected plays, we argue that Yankah provokes environmental debate and a rethinking in African playwrights concerning environmental issues to raise awareness and inspire environmental consciousness and ecological sustainability among people in Africa, and Ghana in particular.