To be given at: History, Postcolonialism and Tradition, The Postcolonial Studies Association Conference, 12 - 13 September 2013 South African audiences are not strangers to Ancient Greek drama. This paper asks whether, in the same...
moreTo be given at: History, Postcolonialism and Tradition, The Postcolonial Studies Association Conference, 12 - 13 September 2013
South African audiences are not strangers to Ancient Greek drama. This paper asks whether, in the same sense as Gilroy's ever-pertinent 'Black Atlantic', there exists a 'Wine Dark Atlantic' which links South African culture back to Ancient Greek theatre and culture. The latter's promotion through the apartheid era, and its use by dissident groups points to the manner in which history is an engagement fundamentally in the present. Considered permissible under the apartheid government's cultural policy, imported theatre from Europe from Shakespeare (although Othello was first performed with a black lead, John Kani, in 1987 at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg) to Sophocles avoided ideological challenges to South African society. Radicalised performances of Antigone by the Serpent Players foregrounded Fugard, Kani and Ntshona's classic dissident play The Island, not only enacting the original's power reversal, but also showing the (arguably) futile nature of such protest. Nevertheless, when looking at anti-apartheid cultural struggle, the agency we attach to such theatre is politically important from a Cultural Materialist perspective, as it challenged official cultural policy and censorship. There is here the implicit relationship between politics and aesthetics.
More recently the work of Yael Farber has contested with the theatrical canon, taking care to relocate these plots to the South African context. Molora (2008), based off Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, and the recent and internationally and locally acclaimed Mies Julie (2012), the appropriation of Strindberg's play, display definite engagement with theatrical traditions. In their performances there is an aesthetic engagement with local and Classical oral traditions. The relationship between text and performance here as a contestation and manifestation of tradition is important here, but also anxieties of the survival and re-performance of canonical, sometimes ancient, texts over South African ones. Molora, in engaging with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's testimonies, deals with the gendered issues and cast of the original, and the crimes against women during apartheid, produced through its cast and writer. Farber's Theatre as Witness project is manifested here in an engagement with Classical theatre, a fertile ground with a long tradition in itself (Fugard's The Island, and Orestes for example). This shows the complex, contingent, material factors shaping Farber's oeuvre. With Farber's contemporary Reza De Wet also exploring her relationship to Chekhov, making sense of dramatic tradition is clearly paramount in challenging the ideological structures and assumptions of South African society and history in the post-apartheid, post-TRC period.