Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-82). / This dissertation explores the efficacy of workshop theatre processes in nurturing intercultural dialogue among members of a multicultural group. It investigates two kinds of intercultural dialogue - interpersonal dialogue and intergroup dialogue - which, it is argued, are each catalysed by different theatrical processes. Theatre games and improvisations seem to nurture an interpersonal dialogue, in which cultural differences are transcended as group members recognise each other's common humanity. Theatre research, on the other hand, seems more able to nurture an intergroup dialogue, in which group members acknowledge and contextualise cultural differences. At the same time, this dissertation proposes that it is unethical and ultimately ineffective for a facilitator to deliberately nurture a purely-interpersonal dialogue or a purely-intergroup dialogue. Rather, the group members themselves should determine the nature of the dialogue in which they participate. The dissertation therefore embraces Fred Casmir' s model of third-culture building, which conceptualises the multicultural group as a 'third-culture' that ideally evolves to accomodate the needs of all of its members.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 37-47). / This essay explicates the queering of a seminal realist text, Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, by means of a queer directorial aesthetic. Using queer theory, the heterosexual matrix (built on a rigid gender binary) and the nuclear family are posited as the crux of heteronormativity, which is the assumption and expectation that subjects are heterosexual.

Includes abstract.|Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-79). / As South African theatre artists we are both challenged and enriched by a diversity ofcultures, languages and traditions amongst both our practitioners and audiences. We are at the same time presented with a social environment that contains entrenched inequalities and divisions, profound trauma and unclear expectations. This affects us not only in the kind of theatre we create in response, but also in how we create theatre. Our rehearsal spaces and stages, like South African educational institutions, are concerned as much with integration and building communication bridges as with production.What I hope to glimpse at least, through this exploration, is a basis for practice that enhances the ability of an ensemble, no matter the degree of diversity, to actively participate in the process of interrogating the essence of a text or theme. I maintain that this collective process will develop open and authentic communication within the group,and that it will vitalize and enhance the impact of the resulting production by allowing the individual participants to make the concept, and its expression, their own.

Includes bibliographical references. / The focus of this research is the translation of deconstruction theory into theatre practice. This is proposed as a way of challenging notions of truth and myths perceived as truth. In dealing with this challenge, notions of post-linearity were applied to text. The application of post-linearity resulted in a theatre collage reminiscent of collage as visual art form . The translation of deconstruction theory into theatre practice was explored by creating and directing a play entitled Trivial Pursuit with senior performance students from the Drama Department of the University of Cape Town. The play premiered at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown on 29 June 2001, followed by a short season at the Arena Theatre of the UCT Drama Department. The following written submission is divided into two parts. The first is an exploration of the theory and creative method that was applied in the process of creating and directing Trivial Pursuit. The second contains the theatrical form of Trivial Pursuit.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-86). / This dissertation seeks to address issues related to community change within the field of Theatre-for development. It proposes and then investigates various ways in which a community may seek to retain a sense of collective ideology in the light of both positive and negative developmental change, as promulgated by agents outside their community. Chapter one, Introduction, begins by introducing the reader both to the fieldwork project and the community, Khethani township, in which the masters degree filedwork was undertaken. It was this fieldwork which prompted the research enquiry covered by this dissertation, to which the reader is introduced. It delineates the research methodologies of both the fieldwork project and this dissertation, and positions the writer in relation to this study. The initial aim of the fieldwork project was to do a practical enquiry into the methods of workshop theatre and the development of a distinct theatre aesthetic that emerges from a community as a result of workshop theatre practices. Having completed the fieldwork project and having considered the results of the initial fieldwork aims a larger research enquiry developed as to the role of workshop theatre within the broader context of community development and this has now become the focus of this dessertation.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-66). / This study is a theoretical explication of an idea of a theatre called Theatre of the Contact Zone. Its main feature is the collaboration between the playwright and the director in the transformation of dramatic texts into performance texts. Within the pragmatics of this theatre the playwright's initial task is to provide a working script. It is only a foundation, the basis, without which the director has nothing to begin coordinating the collaborative process of theatre making. The writing of the script continues through out rehearsals. The final script is compiled after the production incorporating changes made in the course of its transformation into a performance, as well as insights gained through watching the production. The first experiment was through a play called An African Syzygy which I wrote and was directed by Sanjin Muftic (a fellow postgraduate student whose orientation in theatre studies is directing).

Includes the performance script of the play. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-93). / The aim of this explication is to set my practical theatre research, and the production Dolos in particular, in a theoretical framework and performance historical context. Since the central theme of Dolos is the construction of reality and the consequent attachment to aspects of the self, my study draws on the ideas proposed by Phenomenology and Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy.According to these two philosophical systems, the concept of reality is subjective and relative. This leads me to question the functioning of meaning-making in artistic practice. Metaphor is explored as a vehicle for the meaning-making process and for the creation of resonant experience in theatre and performance. The production style of Dolos is one that I have defined as Visual Theatre, a theatre of puppets, objects, visual and theatrical images. Visual Theatre is examined in the context of theatre as an artistic medium; it is then contextualised in terms of its 20th development through the Century; and definitions are offered of the major elements at play within Visual Theatre. A series of interviews conducted with five creator/ directors from four South African companies working in the general terrain of Visual Theatre is used to contextualise current practice in South Africa and to locate my own work. The interviews are used to establish trends of thought around the object/puppet and its relationship in theatre to constructed reality. The views of these practitioners on their own creative process as well as my observations about their practical work are used as examples throughout.

Includes abstract. / Inludes bibliographical references (leaves 56-61). / This paper is an explication of my thesis production Ouma, which was presented in December 2008 towards the fulfilment of the degree Masters of Arts in Theatre and Performance (Theatre Making) at the University of Cape Town. The explication focuses largely on what happens when the myth structuring the identity of an individual changes. How does the individual go about re-narrating identity within the context of the new myth? And how might the creation of performance contribute tothe re-narrating? The first section, Myth of the Selfexamines the concept of 'myth' and 'the Self and how they intersect and influence each other. I demonstrate how myths and the Self intersect and how, through the telling of stories, we create understanding or meaning. The second section, Myth of the Old; Myth of the New, considers the myth of the old South Africa, the myth of the new South Africa, and the different strategies of self-narration that occur in the one and in the other. The third section, Rupture, proposes that there is a powerful impact on individual identities when a political myth is rupture. In conclusion I indicate where the continuation of this investigation may lead.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 32-34). / Emerging directly from three devised performances conducted as practical research projects in the exploration of my thesis, the production supported by this explication titled Afrocartography: Traces of Places and all points in between, (Afrocartography) is located within a series of works that explore an Afropolitan subject position. Towards the goal of articulating a theatrical form, style and aesthetic of this so called Afropolitan experience, the first section of this paper serves to locate the term Afropolitan within a personal contextual frame from which the paper progresses.

In this paper I endeavor to chart the trajectory through my Practice as Research process into, and later development of, what eventually became a performance and literary work entitled Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations. The paper details in the first part, Modes of Disidentification, the practices of three black, interdisciplinary artists: Todd Gray, Sethembile Msezane and Athi-Patra Ruga operating at different intersections of black identity and how their practices exemplify different possibilities for disidentification in creative practice. Using the framework of queer cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz' Disidentifications (1984) as a theoretical base, I endeavor to explore the different techniques that these artists use in response, retaliation and, possibly, congruence to the politics of representation . In order to elucidate and experiment with these techniques I employ a Practice as 1 Research methodology that I unpack in the second half of the paper, Biomythography, critical fabulation and disidentification in Practice. In Biomythography, critical fabulation and disidentification in practice I engage the performance works I created during my masters in Theatre and Performance, namely Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations and icarus descent and illustrate how the theory of disidentification can be performed utilizing the techniques of biomythography (Lorde, 1982) and critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008) that gesture towards a complication of rigid identity theory. Underpinning this research is the desire to explore artistic techniques that complicate rigid, categorical identity theory and practices in the hope that these techniques can serve towards alternatives to and liberation from the social, categorical identity model inherited in Southern Africa through the colonial systems of identity based categorization.