The study utilizes the practitioner/researcher’s own artistic process as a laboratory, if you will, to conduct a broader inquiry into how theatre masks work and a facilitator’s role within the process of "bringing them to life."

This study attempts to ‘re-member' the post-slave South African female body through personal performance practice. It addresses re-membering both as an embodied activity of Recalling erased memory and as a recuperation of the dis-membered post-slave female body. Through reflecting on two examples of personal performance practice, What the Water Gave Me (2000) and Spice Root (2005), I use my own post-slave body as the locus of Intersection between the private and the political, the biological and the historical. The transmission of cultural memory through performance is traced through Joseph Roach's (1996) ‘surrogation' and Diana Taylor's (2003) ‘Repertoire'. Specifically, I employ a syncretic spirituality and objects of cultural memory to re-member a diasporic narrative continuity and recuperate embodied feminine agency. Gabeba Baderoon's (2014) perspective on the Indian Ocean as site of colonial slavery and cultural memory across diaspora and Raissa De Smet Trumbull's (2010) monograph on ‘Oceanic liquidity' inspire a figuration of the Ocean as an embodied, affective, anti-colonial presence. These modalities also inflect the style of writing in my inquiry, thus privileging the material/maternal, cyclical, leaky and excessive qualities of water a counter-hegemonic practice.

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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-69). / This paper explores the convergence and cusp of colliding realities in private and public identities in performative contexts. It draws heavily on a Socio-Anthropological system of the self and fictive personas within these constructs - as well as the perscnlpersonalpersonality trichotomy inherent in self~presentation and preservation. It is written in subservience and supplication to the practical component of the University of Cape Town's MA in Theatre and Performance (Theatre Making) which is also documented and archived with supplementary photographs as part of the research. The paper addresses notions of collective identity (such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, socio-economic and socio-political group clusters) with a peripheral focus on the South African, middle-class, Caucasian identity and a particular focus on a female, hetero-normative orientation (as it forms the premise of many concerns presented in the practice of the inquiry: the artist as still iife, the subject as object). It suggests a methodology towards aligning the research and its actualisation in performance through a series of installation-based works presented on and around Hiddingh Campus, Cape Town between May 2008 and September 2009. At the time of publication, the culminating project of the degree was in its pre-production phase.

Queers of colour are in real and constant danger as they are not seen to belong neatly to either Western queer culture (due to their blackness) or African culture (due to their queerness). This discursive violence legitimizes actual violence on black queer bodies. This research project uses performance as a tool to address black queer erasure and aims to debunk the tired claim that queerness is un-African. In my final thesis production and its accompanying explication, I engage with memory and practices of queer self-fashioning as a means of contesting oppressive, hegemonic, and heteronormative ideologies of gendered racial belonging. Memory thus serves as both a critical concept and an aesthetic impulse in my practice of queer space making. I use performances of intimate childhood memories of shame and othering to articulate how black queer subjects emerge in distinct relation and/or contra-position to the white Euro-American identity construct that dominates understanding of queer citizenship and politics. In so doing, I work towards naming and enacting a “quare” (Johnson, 2001, p. 8) politics that attends to the specificity of black queer lifeworlds. Producing a counterhegemonic queer space that is attentive to the potentially generative tensions between “queerness” and black African indigenous ontologies enables the envisioning and affirming of black African queer subjectivity in all its complexity. I use Johnson's critical reframing of ‘queer' as ‘quare' as the basis for my engagement with queerof-colour critiques of hetero- and homonormativity. Quare in this research study is deployed as part of various contemporary endeavours to locate racialised and class knowledge in identity. It is also used to articulate genderqueer and sexually non-conforming subjectivities such that ways of knowing are viewed both as “discursively mediated and as historically situated and materially conditioned” (Johnson, 2001, p. 13). The practice of self-reflexivity through performance is posited as a method for self-image fashioning in this study. Further, I show in my performance work that Johnson's (2001) construal of self-image-making and performativity have potential for restoring subjectivity and agency through the performance of self.

This study is an exploration of an embodied awareness and the plethora of ways in which what I am ‘falls short' - in relation to being “fully human” (Lugónes, 2010:743). It serves as the creative stimulus to actively explore and resist the ontological arrest of my blackwomnhood. This work aspires towards a kind of social and embodied resistance by means of “deserting exceptionality” (Gqola, 2004:61). As a form of survival, as well as of repairing the ruptured fragments of my being, I want to redefine, for myself, through performance, what it means to be a young, South African, working-class, queer blackwomn. This study therefore necessitates a distinction between ‘who' I am and ‘what' I am through exploring what Adriana Cavarero refers to as the ‘narratable self' (2005: x) in conjunction with Barbara Boswell's ‘creative re-visioning' (2010:1) and what Audre Lorde defines as ‘autobiomythography' (Lorde, 1996). In order to do this, the study employs a Practice as Research approach to explore alternative ways of staging heterogeneous experiences of blackwomnhood using the plurality of voice as a performance mode/tool. This study further reflects on a series of performance projects (as part of the present MA) to interrogate and reflect critically on the scale and complexity of the work/s. Following Cavarero (2005: x), Boswell (2010:1) and Lorde (1996), I explore the oral historical narratives and timelines of Zulu matriarch, Queen Nandi, to imagine a dithyrambic dirge drawn from blackwomn's experiences of ruptures, reckonings and refusals.

A Monologue is an Outrageous Situation! How to Survive the 60-Second Audition explains how to successfully tackle the "cattle call" acting audition with a sixty-second monologue. Through Q&As, tips, director's notes, and a glossary full of outrageous actions meant to inspire the actor into truly connecting with the piece, this book shows actors where and how to find a monologue, edit it, and give the best audition possible. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1259/thumbnail.jpg

Performing the work of William Shakespeare can be daunting to new actors. Author Herb Parker posits that his work is played easier if actors think of the plays as happening out of outrageous situations, and remember just how non-realistic and presen - tational Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be performed. The plays are driven by language and the spoken word, and the themes and plots are absolutely out of the ordinary and fantastic-the very definition of outrageous. With exercises, impro - vi sations, and coaching points, Acting Shakespeare is Outrageous! helps actors use the words Shakespeare wrote as a tool to perform him, and to create exciting and moving performances. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1271/thumbnail.jpg

This essay charts the theoretical background to my approach as a director with regards to creating and inhabiting Heightened Theatrical Landscapes. Primarily it deals with the role of the director as the actor's guide into to an extended space where the actor is the audience's envoy into the unlived human experience. It is a supporting document to my final production of The Possibilities by Howard Barker and it forms a partial fulfillment of an MA degree in Theatre & Performance as undertaken from the position of a director. The essay focuses particularly on the director's role whilst creating with the actors in rehearsals for a production. Firstly, I identify the term “Heightened Theatrical Landscape” and associate it with the works of other theatre practitioners, drawing particularly from the writings and productions of Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski and Howard Barker, and specifically inspired by the latter's Theatre of Catastrophe. I will stipulate the major characteristics of a Heightened Theatrical Landscape with respect to the requirements for the space, actor, audience, and theme. Secondly, I explain how I as the director prepare the foundation for the Heightened Theatrical Landscape, where I will place myself alongside director Peter Brook, and his theories on the director's role. In order for the actor to inhabit the Heightened Theatrical Landscape, I put forward David Rotenberg's acting system as my main director's tool for the process. After a short analysis of the actor's requirements towards inhabiting the Heightened Theatrical Landscape, I will discuss some of the main concepts of the system and give examples of its proposed application to my production of The Possibilities. My analysis will focus on why I believe this system is successful and how it shifts the role of the director into serving as a guide for the actor in placing himself in the Heightened Landscape. As my work is primarily with young actors, I will then articulate a need for methods of working with actors which address vocal and physical training in order to develop a form for the Heightened Theatrical Landscape. I firstly put forward a vocal method, as developed by Cicely Berry, to guide the actor towards the work on the text of this landscape. Consequently, I will introduce my understanding of Anne Bogart's Viewpoints as a complement to Rotenberg's system which addresses the actor's use of the body. I will clarify the principles that are shared between Viewpoints and Rotenberg's acting system before describing the application of Viewpoints within The Possibilities. Lastly, I reiterate my understanding of the combined theories of Rotenberg and Bogart, and how they form the main component of my directing toolbox which will become evident in my production of The Possibilities.