Includes bibliographical references. / The present study investigates the field of theatre practice that I have chosen to call alternative Zimbabwean theatre through a detailed study of four plays and reference to several others all first performed and written between 1980 and 1996. The study interrogates the interweaving and juxtaposition of divergent performance forms and styles on stage created by the contact between western dramatic theatre, indigenous theatre and cultural performances. This contact results in the formation of a third space for theatre which is a creative area of ambivalence, sameness, difference, conflict, struggle, mocking and celebration. The study specifically scrutinises this intersecting area as it obtains in alternative theatre and examines the forces at work in producing the nature and identity of syncretic theatre. Between 1980 and 1996, the nature and identity of alternative theatre changed significantly. This thesis investigates these changes, movements, shifts, conflicts and appropriations and the context within which they took place.

The research investigates experiments with the socio-political functions of public art interventions and suggests that these actions are temporary ruptures which create ‘invisible insurrections' in a context of hyper-surveillance. The paper draws from Hakim Bey's poetic anarchy, “Temporary Autonomous Zones”, and uses his theories to think through the potentially explosive overlaps between public space, live performance, and insurrection. By first locating a history of Worker's Culture in the South African context, the research locates itself within a particular context of class struggle. Reading Augusto Boal, and his Invisible Theatre, the research calls in Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies in an attempt to find a more suitable language, both abstract and concrete, to articulate the need for building solidarity. The study is also interested in the demarcations between theatre, performance art, and live art, and how to sit comfortably between these practice as research methods. To this end, through Mark Fleishman, the research proposes “dwelling” as a mode of performance for the public live art space especially in relation to revealing what is not visible in marginalised terrains. Here, the paper thinks through the possibility of reappropriating invisibility in the system as a cloak for haunting. Themes discussed in the research include insurrection as opposed to revolution; the scope of cultural work in general and the possibility of an emergent worker's culture in the present; the possibility of liberated zones inside the matrix as it is currently mapped; memory-being-made in relation to the archive; in/visibility in connection to ghostlikeness and haunting; collective precarity in system; and the importance of passing moments of ‘seeing each other' to building solidarity in our search for more human ways of being together.

Includes abstract.|Includes bibliographical references (leaves 31-34). / My story, like many of this age, seems attracted to the writing of Shakespeare and so his plays and the philosophies and insights embedded in them have come to have a large impact on me as I study his roles and perform them. I have learned that his sonnets are, equally, repositories of wisdom able to convey much more than argument or aptitude in language and meter – they carry experiential information of a human condition. I propose that it is the actor's task to convey that information, more accurately to recreate the experience with the audience, in ensemble. It is my feeling that Shakespeare understands this actor's task and continuously invokes it in his writing, bringing much of the wisdom of the human experience to the acting experience.

Bibliography: leaves 52-58. / The area of research for this written explication is defining a relationship between fragment and the assemblage of fragment in order to conceive new strategies for developing historical dramatic narrative. There were two significant methods with which the research occurred. One was a critical investigation into the work and writings of visual artists, historians, critics, writers and playwrights who all recognize the area of fragmentation in their specific field. The other was through writing and directing a play with UCT drama students called Lekker Faith (2003). This particular play opened at The Arena Theatre, Orange St, Cape Town on the 1 November 2003. The play joins two earlier plays The Hottentot Venus and the wonder of things unknown (Little Theatre, Cape Town, 2002) and Fourplay (Rehearsal Room, Monument Theatre, Grahamstown, 2003) to form part of an anthology of plays, called The Paris/Cape Town/Joburg Plays.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 30-33). / This explication is focused on the metatheatrical strategies employed in my thesis production: a Mask, a Key and a Pair of Broken Wings, a triptych of three short plays. The paper pursues a deeper understanding of the nature of an audience's engagement with onstage narratives. The production explores existential dilemmas through stories about runaways and escapees. Jean Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (first published 1943) can be construed as a map of the territories that the stories explore. I also employ a Sartrean style of argument in the unpacking ofthe strategies applied in the production's staging. A cornerstone of both the narrative and academic inquiry is Sartre's notion of 'bad faith' and the construction of self through it. In order to fully explore the constructedness of self, the production is done in a metatheatrical form. Metatheatre was coined by Lionel Abel to describe plays that consciously drew attention to their own construction. It is an appropriate form to expose the layers of relationships between the real and the performed. In order to better understand the nature of audience engagement the paper considers two relatively unused sources of dramatic theory, Coleridge and Tolkien. Coleridge's writings in Bibliographia Literaria (first published 1817) on disbelief and poetic faith are used to discuss the receptivity of an audience, while Tolkien's concept of the division between the primary and secondary worlds allows the discussion of what the audience perceives. The key distinction between disbelief and poetic faith is the distinction between intellectual objection and emotional ascent to a secondary world. By discussing the tactics of Metatheatre to be used in a Mask. a Key and a Pair of Broken Wings, the benefits and pitfalls of each strategy is revealed. My argument describes the possible effects of these on an audience's consciousness as the results of variations in the relative strengths of their intellectual and emotional perceptions. Metatheatre is a rupture of the secondary world, the object of the audience's poetic faith. Metatheatre can be a powerful tool in the theatremaker's arsenal only by understanding how poetic faith and disbelief function in tension and in harmony with one another.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 36-40). / This explication focuses on the director working collaboratively in the ensemble towards generating new material inspired by the play text in the staging of the play. The strategy employed to achieve this efect is referred to as a generative dramaturgy. The aim is to foster co-ownership in the actors of teh ensemble by developing their natural and instinctive responses during the translation phase. I specifically look at the South Africa theatre context which neither works in a culturally homogenous environment nor performs to a culturally homogenous audience, and where multicultural theatre is a familiar theatre practice.

Includes bibliographical references. / I will examine how language usage in Post-Apartheid South Africa is central to identity construction and discern in what ways this construction informs my approach to creating performance. I use this paper to offer a frame as to how a relationship to language is socially and historically constructed in post-apartheid South Africa, how this construction affects questions of cultural and linguistic identity, and finally how those identities are performed. This is achieved by exploring how vocal work, text, language and the physical body are integrated to use as material in creating my individual performed vernacular modalities. My research has employed various methodologies to navigate and engage issues of language and identity towards creating a performance. First by using Neville Alexander's research into the history of language and language policy in South Africa, I briefly outline the manner in which languages in South Africa gain dominance and in tum how this affects individual attitudes towards English, Afrikaans and other official vernaculars. As my practice as a performer-creator has been central to the research use the paper to unpack the relationship between notions of language, identity and performance and reflect on my bilingual isiXhosa/English training at The university of Cape Town. I interrogate the manner in which this training is central in shaping my understanding of how the inheritance of, and affiliation with languages, informs identity. I make reference to my own linguistic repertoire as explored through three projects produced within the period of the Masters research conducted at the University of Cape Town (VCT): The Minor Project As Yet Withheld (2011); The Medium Project Four (2011), my one person show created over the December-January period and performed in March 2012. The thesis production There was this sound which at the time of writing is still in production. In my reading of linguistic theories, the use of the terms 'mother tongue', 'home language' and 'first language' are used almost interchangeably to describe the language first learned and used in the home as the primary language . In this research, however, the 'mother tongue', 'home language' and 'first language' are recognised as three different linguistic proficiencies in accordance with linguist Sinfree Makoni' s(1998) understanding of how one engages with language on three levels: inheritance, affiliation and expertise. Thesen's (1997) use of Bakhtin (1988) in relation to identity, is significantly useful in this investigation as it appears to be the most flexible use of Identity Theory taking into consideration, as it does, "life histories and biographies" (Norton, 1997:417) and "seeks to give greater prominence to human agency in theorizing notions of voice" (Norton, 1997: 417). Norton identifies this theory as speaking consciousness - "the individual speaking or writing at the point of utterance, always laden with language of others, from previous contexts and oriented towards some future response" (Norton, 1997:417). Through interviews conducted with black female creator-performers I use their biographies as a means to engage notions of identity and language. Finally, I explore processes of creating the final thesis production There was this sound informed theoretically by the work presented in this paper and produced for the stage by utilizing the actors four major tools "emotion, intellect, body and voice" (Mills, 2009:9) to engage all the languages I have at my disposal as well as learned performance tools, towards creating a new vernacular of performance.

This thesis proposes theatre and performance as tools for understanding the relational emergence of city spaces. It responds to two related urban studies calls. The first is for fine-grained ethnographies of the everyday to learn what city spaces might be becoming in order to strategise how to support these becomings. The second falls under the ‘cultural turn’ in urban thinking: what artistic projects might offer an everyday urbanism. Through an everyday urban lens, the work asserts the performativity of daily actions in constructing space, but also the affectual qualities that daily city life produces. These affectually charged, spatial constructions through the interrelation of daily activity are what make spaces become places, places that are temporary and always evolving. This thesis draws a link between everyday placemaking practices and the artistic practice of playmaking to propose theatre and performance as a way of learning about city spaces, actively engaging with this knowledge and broadcasting it. It argues that theatre and performance staged in the sites it seeks to know and in concert with city dwellers has the capacity to facilitate an embodied, but reflective experience of what it is to be continually implicated as a city dweller in spatial – and therefore place – construction through daily actions. The work takes as its primary focus a year-long participatory theatre and performance project run in the Johannesburg inner city suburbs of Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith’s Paarl, resulting in a ‘site-specific’ play performed in the streets of the area. The practical component to the study is contextualized within the broader landscape of Johannesburg public art interventions over the last 15 years and specifically in relation to two other Johannesburg-based participatory public art projects: Terry Kurgan’s Hotel Yeoville and a series of public art commissions managed by The Trinity Session. The research uses Tim Ingold’s notion of corresponding with materiality in order to know as a methodology in service of understanding cities through their relational construction. This phronetic approach – knowing through doing – is applied to interpreting Kurgan’s and The Trinity Session’s work and to both the making of the theatre project in Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith’s Paarl and the writing of this thesis. The study takes place at the intersection between urban studies, theatre and performance studies and public art. It draws together the socially-engaged concerns and considerations of all three fields to propose theatre and performance as a public art form offering a mode of productive, robust engagement with the contemporary urban moment.

Includes bibliographical references. / This study investigates what happens when dance is introduced into the realm of theatre. Firstly, it looks at how the audience relates to the combination of dance and text. Secondly, it questions whether dance contributes to the actors’ experience of creating a play. To explore these questions, two productions were created. The first was an adaptation of an existing play text that had already been performed in a realistic style; and the second was based on a novel, a text that was not originally written for performance, but which was adapted. The study argues that the presence of dance allows the audience to understand a play more viscerally, rather than only intellectually. Furthermore, it finds that adding the physicality of dance helps actors access emotions in a different way than working with only a script would allow them. The study draws on the theories and practices of a number of theatre practitioners such as Antonin Artaud, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Eugenio Barba, and dance choreographer Pina Bausch. It also focuses on Mathew Reason and Dee Reynolds’s theorizing of ‘kinesthetic empathy’as well as Josephine Machon’s theory of ‘visceral performance'.

This dissertation attempts to draw parallels between my process as a graphic artist and my process as a theatre-maker. The study has been prompted by my discovery of theatre-practitioners whose graphic art practices preceded and suffused their subsequent performance works and my desire to trace the antecedents of this phenomenon. The dissertation charts the movement from art to performance as exemplified by the Futurist and Bauhaus schools who devised a poetics of abstraction for the theatrical stage. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks and modes of practice developed by artists associated with these historical movements, I identify attributes of my own works that function in similar ways. I then go on to link my practice to the concept of the postdramatic as outlined by Hans-Thies Lehmann, with a specific focus on how visuality operates in postdramatic performances. I conclude by articulating the artistic and creative principles that will inform my final production in 2017.