African dramaturgies

The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco: Gary Beadle as Jungle

Last week, I saw two Zimbabwean plays on consecutive nights.  They couldn't have been more different from each other.  I've been mulling over both the productions and the audience / critical response, and finding some very interesting questions about the whole nature of culture and dramaturgy being raised.

Tiata Fahodzi's production Boi Boi is Dead is a play by Zodwa Nyoni, a young black writer of Zimbabwean ancestry who lives in Britain.  The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco, which was at the Gate, is a piece I've known and admired for some time, written by a white Zimbabwean, Andrew Whaley.  Just to add to the complications, Andrew is now in exile from Zimbabwe, and lives in South Africa.  What was so fascinating and provocative about seeing the two pieces in juxtaposition was the realisation that the dramaturgical approach, the sense of culture, was rooted far less in the playwrights' distinct heritages, and far more in the immediacy of their experience.

Boi Boi is set in Zimbabwe, sure - and both the striking orange of the design and the carefully cultivated accents of the cast bear this out.  But in many ways, the piece is actually very Western in its approach.  This is a family drama, set in the aftermath of a charismatic father's funeral.  Relatives and lovers descend, and secrets are pulled out of the past with the atavistic energy of Ibsen.  The presence of Boi Boi as a trumpet-playing ghost is as much a theatrical reminder of this past (like the brother in Death of a Salesman) as an African ancestor-spirit.

Where such spirits seemed to me far more manifest was in Fiasco.  The title character, thrown into a police cell as if from nowhere, is apparently a veteran of Zimbabwe's independence wars, who has been in hiding, unaware that freedom has been achieved.  So he is a ghost too - but a living, present, embodied one - interacting with the other figures in the cell / the stage / the country.  And this 'spirit' evokes the past in a way that is much less naturalistic than in Boi Boi - so that the other characters, and the audience, come to re-experience the process of national self-creation.

This leads to all sorts of strange shifts in the play, which seems to move from the cell to guerrilla camps in Mozambique, villages, and the campaign trail.  Space and time are constantly transformed, evoking a powerful sense that the past is not past - that it exists in the now, shaping the contemporary experience.  On one level, this is the African cosmology evoked by Soyinka and by traditional healers - it is also very close to critical theory, and perhaps especially Marx.  And it is intensely theatrical, because it is about the embodiment of historical forces - spirits - in the immediate physical present.

Or so it seemed to me.  I was very surprised to see the Gate only about half full - so I looked up the reviews.  Almost all of them say that the play is not "clear", that it is "confused" or "messy".  Michael Billington, for example, craves "more information and rather less theatrical game-playing."  That does make you wonder why he goes to the theatre instead of reading historical accounts.  The game-playing, the playfulness of the play, is surely what makes the history being explored emotionally real - which is what theatre is there to do.  If you want facts, there are other places you can go.  What these critics are really saying is that the play failed to fit in with their own pre-conceived sense of what theatre ought to be - that it was not Western, rational, readily understood.  Whaley's is an African approach to theatre - and that is precisely what gives it such power.  Indeed, I would say that its power is even greater in a Western context, precisely because the form becomes as disturbing as the content.  It is (pace Brecht) a process of making strange.

Unfortunately, I saw the last performance.  Otherwise I would be campaigning to get the play an audience.  One that understands it emotionally, not one that seeks only the Western virtue of clarity.

Sunshine on a Rainy Day

We had an amazing day on Saturday, kicking off an exciting new partnership with Chickenshed.  As Dave Carey said in his introduction to the day, it's odd that we should be on this theatre's doorstep, and it took an Australian living in Wales to put us in touch - but thanks to Ian McKenzie-Thurley for seeing the commonalities of interest.  We're all very keen that this relationship should grow.

Sunshine on a Rainy Day was a one-day festival of Southern African culture, held at Chickenshed to complement their play The Rain that Washes, and curated by us.  It's amazing just how much you can cram into one day, if you set your mind to it.  The morning saw two storytelling sessions for children, with Nyemu and Wedzi of World Musik Makers - a Zulu couple who are wonderfully charismatic, and incredibly committed to African culture.  Nyemu tells me that they are now letting out their house in Cambridgeshire to pay for the transportation of equipment to the school they support in Zimbabwe. 

The afternoon started with Idrissa Ouedraogo's film Kini and Adams - a brilliant piece of work which shows relationships collapsing as a mining operation shifts the aspirations of a community.  There was a pretty strong discussion after that - and an even more powerful one in the panel session, Theatre for a Change.  I chaired this, with Arifani Moyo from the Indigeneity project, Christopher Maphosa (on whose life The Rain that Washes is based) and Kate Stafford from Bilimankhwe, who has herself been blogging about the day!  The discussion moved between theatre and politics, theatre for development, theatre and prison, theatre for and by children (in particular CHIPAWO in Zimbabwe), and to the very heart of the post-colonial debate.  It was particularly exciting for us to have the South African High Commissioner, Dr. Z.S.T. Skweyiya, and his wife in the room, and contributing very robustly to the debate.  There was also Dr. Ralph Mguni, the Secretary General of ZAPU, who is awaiting the fall or death of Mugabe before he returns to his Zimbabwean home.  Ralph spoke towards the end of our discussions, and made very clear the importance of cultural activism in the development of the post-colonial space.  For an organisation like ours, working at the interface between intercultural theatre and international policy, this was an inspiring afternoon.

The play, written by Dave Carey with Christopher Maphosa, and performed by Ashley Maynard (pictured) is a solo piece dealing with Christopher's own journey with ZAPU, which took him to Bulgaria with Joshua Nkomo, in preparation for the liberation of Zimbabwe, and then into a nightmare of oppression after the election of Mugabe.  Christopher came to England as a refugee, and his story again underlines the importance of cultural work with refugee communities - it was through working at Chickenshed that he once again found himself a home.  The theatre was packed, and the audience excited!

As if all that wasn't enough, we ended the day with a jazz concert from the great South African trumpeter Claude Deppa.  How exciting was that?

Amnesty at 50

It was my birthday on Saturday - thanks to everybody who left messages on Facebook! It was also an important birthday for Amnesty International - and I've been reading the special issue of their magazine.

It's very striking just how much of this magazine deals with theatre. There's a discussion of a play which was made from an exchange of letters between activists and a political prisoner. There's an interview with Daves Guzha, who I met in Zimbabwe as long ago as 1998, and who is still using performance to work against Mugabe. There's a piece on the assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis from the Freedom Theatre in Jenin. And there's a very strong piece on Henning Mankel and his Teatro Avenida in Mozambique.

Mankel talks about the importance of theatre in illiterate communities - he's very clear that literacy is a way to improve health conditions in a very direct way. And he says something else which could almost be a description of our work at Border Crossings:

"Living theatre is one of the few meeting points in the world where all the false borders, like language and race, come down. Actors, white or brown or yellow, even if they don't speak the same language, can start working together and create art immediately."

More from Gabarone

Another fantastic day in the workshop. The morning was spent on Lecoq's Seven Levels of Tension, which is always a great way to energise inexperienced actors and move them towards spontaneous and original work. That led on to an exercise called "walking into the wrong room", which is self-explanatory and very funny.

In the afternoon, we made use of pieces of clothing that I'd asked the actors to bring in - each had an item with a particular emotional meaning for them. The exercise was deceptively simple - they just had to find a way of presenting that piece of clothing to the whole group. It was truly extraordinary. One young man beat the drum while wearing feathers on his head and a leopard-patterned vest. Another put on shorts, took off his shirt and became a Praise Singer. A mixed-race woman acted her journeys between Africa and Europe, and her decision to buy a traditional German dress so as to embrace that part of her identity. It was all intensely moving, deeply honest, almost shocking in the complexity of its identity politics.

Long talk with David about theatre for development. He's been involved in the form since the 70s, and knows everybody. He's also full of amazing stories about work with Zapu PF during the guerilla war, workshops in Bangladesh which landlords tried to sabotage, theatre workers being imprisoned in or deported from Malawi. We discuss the fact that theatre for development seems to have lost its radical edge these days, has become a little "worthy", and very westernised. In part, he blames the shifting agendas of funders, and in part the more rigorous accounting procedures they are following. In the old days, you used to be able to sneak in revolution under the counter.

Ngugi wa Mirii

I got a copy of the latest edition of African Theatre, and saw an obituary for Ngugi wa Mirii. I hadn't heard - but he died in a road accident in 2008, aged only 56. The obituary, by his more famous namesake Ngugi wa Thiong'o, is very elegantly written. They worked together in the early years of African community theatre, especially the famous Kamairiithu theatre. The Moi dictatorship drove them both into exile. Ngugi was Thiong'o went to the US, and Ngugi wa Mirii to Zimbabwe - like many African intellectuals and idealists (among them Ama Ata Aidoo), who believed that the newly independent nation could become a model for the continent.

It was in Zimbabwe that I met Ngugi wa Mirii in 1997. He had been there 15 years, and had established ZACT (Zimbabwe Association of Community Theatres): an extraordinary organisation which facilitated Theatre for Development on a grand scale throughout the region. The methodology was similar to Boal in Brazil - he showed me a framed photograph of himself shaking hands with Paolo Freire, mounted proudly on his wall. He also gave me a T-shirt, which I still have. It lists the many types of theatre which ZACT presented on the back, and on the front it says "Theatre for Conscientization and Development". I don't wear it often - just when I want to make a point. It usually works.

Watching is Work

Just recently, I've been spending a lot of time watching plays (I often do) and films (which is less common, at least for work - but fun!). It does count as work, because the plays I have to see to keep up with the art-form and the actors, and the films are possible inclusions in Origins. On Thursday, I was at the Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, where I watched no fewer than nine films in a day - admittedly only two of them features. One of these was the wonderful The Waimate Conspiracy - which manages to turn Maori land claims into a comedy, without being remotely patronising (the opposite, in fact). What makes the film really satisfying is its exploration of different forms of truth and proof. The court refuses to accept that the oral traditions through which Maori tell and preserve their history count as "proof" or "evidence", so they are forced into "forgery", which bizarrely and wonderfully turns out to be more "acceptable" than their own reality... This is ideal dramatic material, of course, and the conceit of shooting it all as if it were documentary adds to the sense of a film exploring different levels of fiction, reality and performance, with clear political implications.

The same evening (you see, it really is hard work...) I'm at the Oval House, to see a new play called Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe. It's by Gillian Plowman, and seems in many ways to be autobiographical: like the leading character, Gillian has exchanged letters with young people and teachers from Zimbabwe. I find many of the moral dilemmas around disparities in wealth and our perceptions of one another very familiar, and very frankly portrayed. It's wonderfully designed by my friend Iona McLeish, who manages to use the entire space with a single rake - back-lit and smokey it gives a space of imagination for the Zimbabwean characters, avoiding the representational, which allows the play to be much more clearly about the written words and the imaginative engagement with Africa that comes from it. It's a very beautiful, economical, lyrical production.

And now I'm off to the Australian High Commission for a reception for Bangarra Dance. It actually is work, you know.....