Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-55). / The major research behind this written explication was the creation of a play about tea-cups and doing the washing. This production was devised, directed, designed and written with several UCT drama students, other selected performers and musicians and played at The Little Theatre, Orange St, Cape Town, in October 2004. I wanted to make a piece of 'home - grown' theatre, a term I have developed to describe a primarily visual art-form that focuses on recognising beauty in everyday existence. Home-grown theatre is concerned with the profound importance of very commonplace things and the complexity and density contained within this mundane terrain. This paper explains the concepts and principles that surround home-grown theatre to provide a context for the thinking and the motivation behind it. This paper explicates both the theory that informed my ideas for its conception and the philosophies of art and science that inspired my style for making the play. It investigates the work and writings of artists, philosophers, scientists, playwrights and theatre practitioners, who all identify elements in their fields, which link them to my home-grown theatre.

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