South African Theatre Journal最新文献

{"title":"Creating a psychologically believable character: investigating the manifestation of the filicidal mother in And all the children cried (Jones and Campbell 2002)","authors":"N. Holm, M. Pretorius","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2023.2208125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2023.2208125","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the extent to which And all the children cried (Jones and Campbell 2002) adheres to research on maternal filicide. This would determine the degree to which an actor charged with playing the filicidal mother, Gail, would be able to create a psychologically coherent and believable character. A contextualization of Western realist acting approaches and its relationship to the written text serves as framework for this article. The three most dominant fields of research on maternal filicide – psychiatric, psychological and psychosocial – are reviewed to establish whether these fields have succeeded in establishing a discernible environmental and clinical profile for mothers who kill their children. This is used as a starting point for the text analysis. After analysis of the text, it was found that the character of Gail seems to be an amalgamation of different symptomology associated with maternal filicide and as such an actor would have difficulty in creating a psychologically coherent character adhering to the proven factors that could lead a mother to kill her children.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49557325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Occupational Health and Safety concerns within the live events industry at selected venues in Gaborone, Botswana: a pragmatic and utilitarian approach","authors":"Kgosi Khiba, O. Seda, Anre Fourie","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2023.2185284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2023.2185284","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates potential hazards and health and safety risks in the live events industry in the city of Gaborone, Botswana. The study borrows from Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1995) philosophical pragmatism and John Stuart Mill’s (1879) utilitarianism to investigate potential hazards and health and safety risks in the city of Gaborone’s growing live events industry and how the risks could be mitigated. Using a fieldwork investigation conducted in 2018 and 2019, the study proceeds from the premise that the live events industry is not only precarious but a highly technical and risk-sensitive industry. Therefore, the study investigated the country’s levels of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) awareness in the live events industry and the levels of preparedness to mitigate risk in that industry. The paper argues that the city (and country) could benefit from putting proper safety guidelines and regulations in place. Much as Botswana could easily borrow safety regulations from similar jurisdictions, it is posited that the neighbouring country of South Africa has structures and legislation in place from which Botswana can borrow. Therefore, Botswana must establish a well-coordinated national structure that will foreground OHS issues and put safety regulations in place in the live events industry. We adopt philosophical pragmatism within a qualitative approach based on interviews, questionnaires, and direct and indirect observation. The field data was used to answer the question; ‘What are the potential health and safety hazards in the city of Gaborone’s live events industry, and how can these risks be minimised?’ The answers to this question were used to propose what can be done to mitigate potential safety concerns in the live events industry.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45530087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Space for haunting: site-specific theatre as method for engaging with the complexity of heritage sites","authors":"Alexandra Halligey, T. Guhrs","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2023.2174901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2023.2174901","url":null,"abstract":"This paper considers a devised, site-specific performance in and about the Windybrow, a mining magnate heritage house-turned-arts-centre in Johannesburg’s inner city Hillbrow. The work was called Ngale kweNdlu, which translates from isiXhosa as ‘The Other Side of the House.’ Through scenographic installations and interwoven theatrical narratives, characters and scenes, Ngale kweNdlu sought to draw out the less told, untold and invisibilized elements of the house’s 122-year-old story, putting them in critical dialogue with the documented archival history of the building. From process to final product the notion of haunting became an ever richer way of understanding our engagement with complex heritage through theatre-making in the Ngale kweNdlu process. This paper argues for the ways in which haunting played throughout the work, advocating for theatre as a tool to mobilize hauntings productively in navigating heritage with sensitivity to past social injustices and their legacies in contemporary moments. We do draw significantly on the spectral turn of European critical theory, but our sense of haunting is informed more expansively by the ways in which post-colonial and decolonial discourse argue for an understanding of the spectral that takes seriously cosmologies outside of European paradigms.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42696857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Transgressive marginalities in youth pop culture: negotiating the challenges of the post-colony in contemporary Zimbabwe","authors":"O. Seda, Ngonidzashe Muwonwa","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2023.2174902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2023.2174902","url":null,"abstract":"In the last two decades, Zimbabwe has faced a series of intractable political and socio-economic crises, resulting in abject economic collapse, stratospheric levels of inflation and massive youth unemployment. The country’s youth have responded to these endless crises through creative artistic expression via music and satirical videos, which are often circulated on social media platforms. This cultural activism by Zimbabwean youth is indicative of the distinctive ways in which the intersections of media globalization and situated local conditions have animated new popular cultural forms by youth in Africa. This paper, harnesses Nancy Fraser’s (Fraser, N., 1990. Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text (25-26), 56–80) concept of alternative public spheres and Mikhail Bakhtin’s (Bakhtin, M., 1984. Rabelais and his world. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.) notion of the carnival to analyse young people’s satirical videos posted on social media as creative responses that are used to protest the lived realities of economically marginalized youths even as they articulate significant needs and aspirations of their own. The paper views and analyses social media as a platform that is used to criticise and lampoon post-colonial excesses by the ruling elite who wield political and economic power. Youth popular culture is explored as a platform on which urban youths have sought to highlight and to contest the politics of survival in contemporary Zimbabwe in some highly creative and innovative ways.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49410754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"European tragedy as requiem, ruin, revenant in Magnet Theatre’s Antigone (not quite/quiet) and Thomas Köck’s antigone. a requiem","authors":"C. Wald","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2023.2185285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2023.2185285","url":null,"abstract":"Offering a comparative case study of two different postcolonial responses to Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone from European and African perspectives, this article brings together Magnet Theatre’s Cape Town production of Antigone (not quite/quiet) with Thomas Köck’s play antigone. a requiem that premiered almost simultaneously in September 2019 in Hannover, Germany. Both re-examine Sophocles’s tragedy to come to terms with their respective colonial histories and postcolonial challenges: while Magnet Theatre engages with the ancient material to reflect on the difficulties of fully overcoming the legacies of colonialism in post-apartheid South Africa, Köck explores the afterlives of ‘thebaneuropean’ colonialism as manifested in current European migration policies. Comparing the adaptation principle of Magnet Theatre’s ‘ruinous’, fragmenting approach to the literary and theatrical archive of European colonialism to Köck’s postdramatic recomposition of Antigone as a requiem for migrant deaths and for European tragedy itself, the article discusses the productions in their respective contexts of political protest movements. Drawing on cultural theory of ungrievability, domopolitics, and postcolonial shame, it explores the central functions of the chorus – indecisive Europeans on the verge of anagnorisis in Köck’s play, the post-apartheid South African generation caught between rage and disillusionment in Magnet Theatre’s production – and as well as the prominence of Ismene as a problematic survivor figure in both adaptations.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"35 1","pages":"212 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48084814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction","authors":"Mark Fleishman, Veronica Baxter","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2023.2233789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2023.2233789","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue focuses on a production, Antigone (not quite/quiet), created and staged at the Baxter Theatre, in Cape Town, in 2019. The production was one of a number of similar productions created as part of the project: Reimagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South (ReTAGS), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation between 2019 and 2023. ReTAGS is a project that proposes to take a concept – tragedy – from the very beginnings of theatre in its European manifestation and therefore of the discipline of Theatre Studies which is decidedly European, and to reimagine it from a perspective in Africa that is at once directed at the complex challenges of our global postcolonial present and towards our possible futures both inside and outside of the theatre. It is clear that there have been numerous adaptations and stagings of ancient tragedies by major writers and theatre-makers across the African continent, particularly through the period of anti-colonial struggle and the rise of independent nation-states after the Second World War. To name just a few on the continent: Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Femi Osofisan, J.P. Clark (Nigeria), Efua Sutherland (Ghana); Ebrahim Hussein (Tanzania), Sylvain Bemba (Congo Brazzaville), Saad Ardash and numerous others (Egypt), Athol Fugard and others (South Africa); Trinidad Morgades (Equatorial Guinea). In the Afro-diaspora: Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Félix MorisseauLeroy (Haiti), Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), Derek Walcott (St Lucia). There is something about these plays and their playing that appeals to African theatremakers, performers and audiences. ReTAGS has set out to interrogate this vast body of work produced in the theatres of Africa and its diaspora. Furthermore, and importantly for this special issue, it uses performance methodologies as analytical tools to gain purchase on the complex realities of the colonial aftermath by investigating current events in the postcolony beyond the theatre, through the ‘prism of tragedy’ (Quayson 2003, p. 56). The project is inspired by a reading of the recent work of David Scott (2004; 2014) and of Hans-Thies Lehmann (2016). For Scott, in rough summary, the history of anticolonialism and its aftermath has traditionally been framed through the trope of romance: the triumph of good after trials and tribulations. Such a framing is dependent on a utopian horizon towards which the narrative proceeds. This has led to a triumphalist narrative of salvation and redemption in which the evil colonial regime is overthrown by the steadfast persistence and bravery of the people and/or the anticolonial hero who emerge victorious at the end. Scott examines the revisions CLR","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"35 1","pages":"145 - 149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48883148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The digital archive as storyteller","authors":"Jayne Batzofin, Sanjin Muftić","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2022.2136744","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2022.2136744","url":null,"abstract":"Theatre in South Africa is deeply entrenched in the art of storytelling. We live, speak and move our stories in our embodied performance practices. While performance and its development are by their nature ephemeral, how can they be captured as data? And how can the data develop digital outputs that eventually tell their own stories? This paper will outline the way in which the rehearsal process of Antigone (not quite/quiet), the first of three practice-based research productions of the ReTAGS project, was documented and curated into an online repository. As data stewards, we will share the journey undertaken to migrate the ephemeral process of theatre devising into interactive and searchable data on UCT’s digital collections platform, Ibali. We chronicle the processes and jobs undertaken to capture, catalogue, document, enhance, curate and showcase the material. We explore how an online repository can be constructed not only in order to share the multiple stories present in the rehearsal process, but to encourage further engagements to advance a rigorous living archive. Through this we aim to give precedence to the way artist-researchers can use performance-based methods as reputable means by which to produce data, in order to drive academic research.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"35 1","pages":"227 - 242"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46411268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"(Un)Belonging in the body of the chorus","authors":"Kanya Viljoen","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2023.2174899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2023.2174899","url":null,"abstract":"In September 2019, Mark Fleishman in collaboration with the cast created a postdramatic performance of Sophocles’ tragedy ‘Antigone’, entitled Antigone (not quite/quiet). One of the key elements of the performance was the representation of Antigone as a chorus of 13 individual bodies, including that of my own body. During the performance, the chorus came to represent a re-imagined Antigone-figure as the youth of South Africa, the protesting body, and the female body saying ‘no’. Using auto-ethnographical writing, this article recounts the experience of (un)belonging in the postcolonial and postdramatic chorus that came to represent Antigone, specifically with regards to the discomfort and impossibility encountered in the attempt to position myself as a white, Afrikaans, female body in relation to that of a choral body representing the voice of the South African youth. It argues that the chorus functions as an ever-liminal state, one in which both the ‘I’ and ‘we’ exist, at once being within and without, and therefore holds the potential to function as a performance analytic to the tragic experience of the individual within a larger societal identity.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"35 1","pages":"167 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47516521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aesthetic distance as deus ex machina when the performer’s trauma is (not quite/quiet)","authors":"B. Ngcobo","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2023.2241463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2023.2241463","url":null,"abstract":"This article employs Practice as Research (PaR) as a paradigm to explicate the specialised research insights produced during the theatre-making process of devising and performing ReTAGS’ Antigone (not quite/quiet). I revisit Sophocles’ original Antigone, reading the circumstances of the titular character alongside the contemporary reality of postapartheid South Africa. I further employ the register of tragedy to develop my earlier conception of mbokodofication and interrogate the transgressive potential of aesthetic distance to mitigate retraumatization in performance and maintain the emotional hygiene of the performer.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"35 1","pages":"179 - 194"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48207316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Antigone [not quite/quiet]: adaptation, the anarchive and afterness","authors":"Mark Fleishman","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2023.2173285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2023.2173285","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses, from an insider perspective, on a contemporary South African production that was a response to Sophocles’ Antigone, performed at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in 2019. The production was titled: Antigone (not quite/quiet) and formed part of the Reimagining Tragedy in Africa and the Global South (ReTAGS) research project. The author is credited as the director of the production. The article provides a detailed discussion of the production dramaturgy and the strategy of adaptation used, and argues that this strategy is different from previous adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy that the author has produced since the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994. The article relates this strategy of adaptation to the anarchive following Jacques Derrida. It then goes on to discuss the production in relation to ideas of afterness and metamorphosis with reference to Ovid and Franz Kafka.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"35 1","pages":"150 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48686472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}