Realism, non-realism and the African performer

The camera, the film, the television and globalization have finished the work the Realists, the Naturalists and Konstantin Stanislavski began. Whereas, for millennia, African art was ideologically non-Realist, realism – one might say, Western realism – has swept the board. I say ‘ideologically’, perhaps the better word is ‘aesthetically’. There were artists who believed that capturing a likeness was worth it, but these were relatively few and far between. The idea of art – hence ‘ideologically’ – for most artists was not to copy. Verisimilitude was not a goal. What was the point? Art was art and reality was reality – two different things. For the artist, the imagination rather than observation was paramount. African artists sought to express the symbolic, the spiritual, the decorative or the usefulness of their subjects. Theatre artists over the ages and in different parts of the world have sought the truth but there are many kinds of truth and therefore many ways in which theatre artists have expressed it. There can’t be many artists who do not strive to be truthful – though religion, politics and capitalism have their fair share of those who don’t – and these have shown that realism has no monopoly of the truth. Africans are now so acculturated that many no longer understand artistic non-real expression and when confronted by it either show no interest or search for ways to reconcile it with their realist expectations. Nevertheless, in the present time, it is the theatre, along with sculpture and visual art, that is still rooted in the origins of African art. African non-realism thrives in the theatres of Africa and nowhere more than in South Africa. Though this is so, i.e., that indigenous theatre in South Africa, to a large extent, creates its spectacles in the spirit of African realism, the universities, it would seem, still tend to teach most aspects of performance according to the gospels of European and North American realism. This phenomenon might not be entirely restricted to South Africa, though, owing to the hegemony of Western culture in South Africa, it is probably a lot more entrenched there than elsewhere. There are those who, in the spirit of decolonizing the university syllabus, are giving this anomaly serious attention. In the interests of theatre, their efforts deserve to be supported.