Owen Seda

Language of the Inanimate - A Reductionist Approach to Realism by Adapting Marionette Movement through a Physiological Study of Animal Motion

This paper is based on a practical project involving an in-depth study of animal physiology and locomotion with a view to constructing five animal marionettes in which the focus was on their movement. The purpose was to make them come across to an audience realistically and convincingly solely based on their movement. The researchers attempted to reject the emphasis placed on visual accuracy in modern realism and naturalism, arguing that, in the case of inanimate objects such as puppets, realistic and convincing approximations of reality did not need to rely on visual accuracy but could rely on movement. To prove this, the marionettes were not given the physical attributes of the animals in their natural state. To test the effectiveness of reliance on movement, the marionettes performed for an adult audience consisting of thirty respondents whose ages ranged from 18 to over 60. In analysing the data, the respondents were divided into three age groups: 18–39, 40–59, and 60+. Each respondent was ascribed a number to ensure confidentiality. The performance was deliberately devoid of the usual attributes of the theatre such as storyline, character roles, sound and lighting. The respondents evaluated the effectiveness of the animal marionettes and completed an open-ended questionnaire. The findings indicated that the realistic movement of the marionettes was so effective that it persuaded the respondents to view the marionettes as convincing and realistic.

CIVIL SOCIETY, RELIGION AND APPLIED THEATRE IN A KAIROTIC MOMENT - PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS ON A PROJECT ON POLITICAL VIOLENCE & TORTURE IN ZIMBABWE: 2001 – 2002

This article is a critical reflection on possibilities for social transformation and democratisation that can be possibly realised through collaborations between young people in civil society, African traditional religion and the Christian movement in contemporary contexts. In this context the focus on young people as key agents of change is informed by the frequent observation that young people are often the major perpetrators (and victims) of political violence and yet the least beneficiaries from the political spoils. The article analyses a project in the use of applied theatre to address political violence and torture that was conducted by the University of Zimbabwes Department of Theatre Arts and Amani Trust some time between October 2001 and March 2002. The article uses that project to investigate and to illustrate some of the opportunities that can be harnessed by religious arms of civil society to strengthen peace in disadvantaged rural communities, such as we find in contemporary Zimbabwe, and which often bear the brunt of social unrest in times of political uncertainty. The study approaches time as a social construct that determines human agency and decision-making in order to adopt the biblical concept of ‘kairos’ or the ‘kairotic’ moment. The ‘kairotic’ moment referred to in this paper is the period between 1999 and 2008 when the Zimbabwean polity faced one of its severest national crises following protracted political contestation. This resulted in unprecedented levels of political intolerance, and state-sanctioned violence and torture in the country’s post-independence history. This level of political violence was perhaps second only to the infamous Gukurahundi massacres, which took place in the Midlands and Matebeleland provinces during the mid-1980s. We also view the kairotic moment as a critical moment for making a fundamental decision. It is full of both promise and danger, so much so that whether the moment ‘reaps’ hope or danger depends on how the moment is seized. We ask: Did civil society seize the moment to reap hope? In other words, we analyse whether various arms of Zimbabwean civil society took advantage of the ‘pregnant’ or kairotic moment to liberate itself. The authors adopt existing discourses on civil society and liberation theology to argue that whenever the time is ripe for meaningful intervention, there in fact exist immense opportunities for different branches of civil society domiciled in both traditional African and modern Christian religions to harness applied theatre in the service of peace and democratisation in the face of political adversity and uncertainty.Â

Ambivalent Narratives of Traditional African Womanhood as Normalising Discourse in Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost

Summary Feminist critics of African literature have observed that the domination of African literary outputs by male writers has led to romanticised and negative portrayals of the female character in contemporary African literature. Male writers have been accused (and often rightly so) of valorising and projecting the female character as not only docile and passive, but largely dependent on menfolk for her basic sustenance and survival (Ajayi 1997; Nfah-Abbenyi 1997). According to these critics, African literature written by men has predominantly robbed the female character of the power of agency, often idealising and romanticising her as fragile and weak. The female character is often conflated with Mother Africa as she is also presented as the ultimate symbol of human fecundity. In those rare instances when she has been credited with the power of agency, she has been portrayed as rebellious, evil and constitutive of mortal threats to stability and social equilibrium. Be that as it may, a considerable number of contemporary African women writers have striven to circumvent these negative portrayals of the female character. They seek to offer more dynamic representations of female subjectivity in African literature. In this paper, however, I argue that Ama Ata Aidoos The Dilemma of a Ghost presents the reader with striking narratives of traditional African womanhood, which are at once nearly equally progressive and regressive. I argue that whereas Aidoos play challenges traditional patriarchy by subverting certain discriminatory female stereotypes and normative perceptions of women that are prevalent in traditional African societies, the play nevertheless exudes an ambivalent attitude towards female emancipation. I also argue that this ambivalent attitude unwittingly reinforces the very negative images of the female character which Aidoo sets out to subvert.

Grotesque realism in Dambudzo Marechera's drama

The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera has been hailed for the modernist influences in his works. Marecheras literary outputs have also continued to fascinate contemporary readers because of the writers overtly autobiographical writing style that was based on his outrageous lifestyle.While this article acknowledges the frequent observation that Marechera‘s work displays consistency of style, focus and purpose across his chosen literary genres (namely the novel, the poem, the short story and drama), I focus on the least studied genre in Marecheras literary output, his drama. I will argue that as an embodied art form that is meant for performance rather than private reading as literature, drama allows Marechera to perform the body as a significant site for elements of grotesque realism in his works. Using selected plays by Dambudzo Marechera as illustrations, the article will analyse the extent to which Marecheras plays present the body in performance as a site of post-independence social criticism where, as Mikhail Bakhtin and others critics observe, the material bodily principle with its predilection for consumption, food, drink, merry-making, death, excrement and sexual reproduction is exposed.

Intrusive hegemonies and localised identities in early South African drama and theatre: 1880 to 1930

Studies in early African drama which focus on the onset of colonialism have often assumed a binary approach, wherein Eurocentric discourses were pitted in mortal combat against backward African cultural forms within the grand narrative of Europes civilising mission. This article attempts a radical alteration to this focus. It adopts hegemony and resistance theory in order to foreground possibilities for an alternative reading of early South African drama. It departs from the traditional reading of African theatre that views contact between European and African dramatic forms as no more than an attempt at elimination through co-option, arguing for a more nuanced reading wherein attempts at co-option and elimination of African dramatic forms were in fact replete with numerous instances of symbolic resistance. The principal argument is that African forms continued to assert themselves in subtle ways even in those instances where Eurocentric discourses had attempted or apparently succeeded in their elimination, co-option and domestication. We focus on South African drama between 1880 and 1930. We view this era as one that marks the beginning of a contested post-colonial contact zone in early South African drama, in which intrusive Eurocentric cultural hegemonies were resisted by local identities through the efforts of apparently co-opted African drama groups and playwrights of the time.

Power dynamics in applied theatre: interrogating the power of the university-based TfD facilitator – the UZ theatre and CARE Zimbabwe's Zvishavane/Mberengwa NICA project and SSFP as case study

One of the central tenets in applied theatre is the ability to confront issues of ‘power’ and ‘powerlessness’. Indeed, success or lack thereof in applied theatre projects is often adjudged against the ability or the extent to which these projects are, or have been able to ‘empower’ the ‘powerless’. In this paper we seek to examine the extent to which, in spite of the traditional tensions between ‘power’ and ‘powerlessness’, the power of the facilitator can be a positive force that ought to be celebrated and harnessed towards resisting and subverting larger forces of manipulation and power in given rural contexts, especially when the facilitator works with the ‘less privileged’. We also seek to demonstrate that even though grass-roots participants in Theatre for Development (TfD) projects may appear as passive objects of power, project participants in apparently ‘non-political’ and paternalistic projects also enjoy a complex relational subjectivity in terms of the power dynamics of applied theatre projects. The paper is inspired by the recognition that all power can be overtly or covertly resisted. Thus Foucaults discourses on power and resistance and Scotts theorisation of public and hidden transcripts provide the theoretical foundations to this paper. Foucault and Scotts theorisation of power is consistent with postcolonial African views on power which conceptualise power in relational terms. Postcolonial theorists such as bell hooks, Mangeni and Mbembe all suggest that the ‘weak’ have their own forms of power which are often ignored by the powerful in their pursuit of the grand narratives of normative power relations. We draw on our personal experience as university-based facilitators in a TfD project which took place in the two rural districts of Zvishavane and Mberengwa in southern Zimbabwe between 2001 and 2004.