I have attempted a reading of Aristotle in terms of mimesis, ethos, mythos, lexis, hamartia, anagnorisis, peripeteia, catharsis and anamnesis - as an existential “being there” (Dasein) of the characters’ freedom and actual historicity - in three of my plays in which I performed or witnessed in productions in England, Wales, three Scandinavian countries, the U.S. and South Africa. I have analysed other Southern African “womanist” performative drama and feminist theatre. I assume with the ancient Greeks that in serious theatre there is theoria, an educated, discursive looking, which involves a dialectics of logos in dianoia intertwined in the mythos – ethical truth in the discourse of the plot. Whilst aesthetics cannot be reduced to psychobiography, creative writing is motivated in part by the author’s and the dramatic subjects’ psychoanalytically understood personal and political unconscious placed in the ethos – the character on the stage. The aesthetics of tragedy relate to both peripeteia (reversals) and anagnorisis (recognition of responsibility) which occur within an arc of development, crisis and denouement of the vicissitudes of purported wisdom in understanding how performative drama and critical theatre have been presented in what has become known as The Struggle in a post-apartheid South Africa and post-colonial Zimbabwe by comparison with historical conditions in South America, India, even China. The values of nous, phronesis and sophia, intuitive, practical and interpretative wisdom are connected to the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics with which the tragic-comic hero and his Other are imbued or violate. The post-structuralist aesthetic as developed in the literary theory of the twentieth century is essentially the interaction of synchronic and diachronic language emerging from the signifiance and the semiosis of the chora (the feminine or maternal unconscious) within the de-familarisation techniques of Russian and Czech Formalism. This provides a creative and meaningful limit to a consciousness of being-white and beingblack- in-the-world against disempowering Nothingness or perceived Otherness threatening moral beings. Nothingness and the Other are characterised magically and as witch-craft in oral-cultures which deny the unconscious and resort to paranoia and persecution of Otherness in the subject projected onto the other – the “colonial personality”. Shades of Brown has been re-written as Jannie Veldsman – A Film 8 Scenario and I have incorporated into a revised The Cape Orchard a retrospective anticipation of the coming of the new South Africa. I reflect on what tragic drama on the stage and in real life in South Africa means now that the new South Africa is over its honeymoon period and faces serious problems of failed governance. Within the dialectic of an enlightened rabbinical morality of Hillel the Elder (“What is hateful to you do not do to others….” and “If I am not for myself who will be for me…?”) and Kant’s categorical imperative of human beings as a priori ends, I follow the fortunes of an old Jewish veteran of The Struggle, dating back to the Defiance Campaign of 1952/3. Fugard’s work is exemplary in fostering a sense of Sartre’s Nothingness and nihilation which “haunts” Being and is the space of undecidability in relation to my condition of freedom allowing the transcendence of Being. Being asserts reparation and redemption in the face of the depressive and paranoid subject/object split in the subject’s being-in-the-world. Plays ideally submerge this existentialist, psychoanalytic and Aristotelian dramaturgy in the form of Kierkegaard’s faith and Nietzsche’s will which are part of the Encompassing in Karl Jasper’s metaphysics - the residue of a Judaeo-Christian ethics facing the anomie and aporia of the postmodern. The new South Africa was only ostensibly built on Greek and Judaeo- Christian secular ethics – “truth and reconciliation”. It inherited state, revolutionary and criminal violence, as well as a sophisticated economic infrastructure, masspoverty and a segregated educational, social and welfare system which in the milieu of ANC incompetence and corruption have for the very poor got worse but to the benefit of a new African oligarchy, the beneficiaries of a dysfunctional affirmative action policy. What is to be done? Irigaray’s striking metaphor “the speculum of the Other woman” suggests that we are reflected by the instrument we use for investigating what may be Other to us: “we” are westerners trying to live in Africa. “We” are Other – not as autochthonous as the African majority. But the autochthonous can also behave as Other and may even fail to recognise the Other in themselves. Franz Fanon’s “colonial personality”, like ex-president Thabo Mbeki, misunderstands the colonial Other in himself which, disastrously, he projects and attacks in the imaginary and persecutory Other, only to suffer the return of the Real, as do the dramatic fictions Van Tonder in Shades of Brown, Dianne Cupido in The Cape Orchard and Harry Grossman the old man’s son in The Zulu and the Zeide (inspired by a short story by Dan Jacobson). 9 The Russian and Czech Formalists and Structuralists show us how to foreground the Real through techniques of de-familiarisation which can be applied to modernist and post-modernist “womanist” performance drama and feminist theatre. Defamilarisation, especially in an Africa struggling between failed and successful colonialism and often ruled by more or less corrupt elites, sensitizes us to a moral nihilism which characterises the failed African state - described by Conrad as a “heart of darkness” transcended in aletheia – being oneself in the self-showing light of one’s ethos operating through a personal and political unconscious mystified in the rhetoric of oral-cultures. Playwrights such as Yael Farber, Fraser Grace, Aletta Bezuidenhout and Fatima Dike express a semiosis of the unconscious and the signifiance and “absurdity” of logos suggesting that all is not lost in post-apartheid Southern Africa as regards human values, whilst struggling with the political correctness demanded in The Struggle. A partially successful colonialism in parts of Africa could within a British education system, produce a Wole Soyinka who transcends the propaganda of agit-prop by showing the parabolic arc of tragedy afflicted with peripeteia. The weight of African backwardness is not only the negative heritage of colonialism and slavery but Africa’s immersion in traditional partially modernised, but still patriarchal, often tribally and religiously split oral-cultures. These enable the colonial personality to unconsciously or opportunistically exploit his paranoiac sense of his victimage at the expense of the writing-cultures of development which entail anamnesis and the redemption through anagnorisis.

This dissertation combines African philosophical discourses with perspectives on cultural performativity to explore the theme of ‘deconstructing the native’ and ‘imagining the postnative’ through theatre. The dissertation consists of two main parts, a theoretical and a ‘practical’ section. The latter consists of ideas on how to translate the insights gained from the theory section into a strategy for making theatre. The theory section focuses on the aesthetically groundbreaking early works of South African theatre director Brett Bailey (Chapter 1), and their relevance to themes of African philosophy (Chapter 2). Using the concept of ‘engendering space’ as a point of contact between African discourse and theatre praxis, I show how Bailey’s theatre engendered a physical and metaphysical space in which to deconstruct the native and imagine the post-native. I consequently argue that Bailey’s aesthetic revolution has immense political and ethical consequences for contemporary African society. I imagine what these consequences are by deconstructing the cultural and moral discourse generated through critical and public responses to Bailey’s often controversial work. The practical section comprises an academically extended version of the professional theatre project proposal for my play, Hondo Love Story, which will be staged subsequent to this dissertation. The contents of the section include my strategy for engendering an aesthetic space similar, but not identical, to that of Bailey’s plays (Chapter 3). The similarities include aspects of form, theme and content, which I imagine may result in Hondo Love Story having a similar relevance to the theme of deconstructing the native and imagining the post-native through theatre. While I do not systematically deconstruct the play to fully elucidate this, I explain (Chapter 4) the more ‘intellectual’ aspects of content such as historical subtext and psycho-mythical narratives underlying story structure and characterisation. The complete script for the play is appended. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

Theatre is a political space which often reflects the social, political and personal conditions and consciousness of our society. It is also a place that allows for the speaking of private stories; a space that proffers the construction, re-construction, articulation and re-articulation of identities. Coloured, Indian and Bantu (1) identities were all defined ‘black’ within the simplistic categorisation of the complex, problematic apartheid (2) system that perceived individuals as either ‘black' (3) or ‘white’. As much as the apartheid system is one wherein the notion of ‘black’ shifted, it remained a system in which ‘black’ was often constructed as a homogeneous category of identity. In its zenith during the late 1940s, apartheid’s ‘blacks’ referred to the Bantu populace. Coloured and Indian identities were therein recognised as not ‘white’, and so were inadvertently considered ‘black’; perhaps just not ‘black enough’. Coloured and Indian identities were therefore located as vague and marginalised identities in a system that while on the one hand did not impose the same fierce oppression as inflicted on the Bantu, was also one which on the other hand excluded these groups from enjoying the benefits of being privileged whites. Then came the 1980s which saw a shift in the make-up of black/ness where apartheid ideology was concerned. With the birth of the invidious tricameral system which came to govern South African society until the emergence of a democratic nation in 1994, ‘black’ was now broken down and defined into its constituent parts: Bantu, Coloured and Indian. Although this system seemingly regarded each of these race groups, in that each was now named and thus acknowledged as opposed to simply being defined as the homogeneous category of ‘black’, it was nonetheless a system that separated and consequently gave rise to unequal power relations not only between ‘black’ and ‘white’, but now also within these three distinct black/nesses existing within ‘black’. Navigating the most historically marginalised of identities – the black female – this dissertation examines the construction of black South African female identities in the respective post-1994-produced play texts by six black South African female playwrights: Motshabi Tyelele’s Shwele Bawo (In Homann, 2009), Bongi Ndaba’s unpublished play text Shaken (see appendix A), Lueen Conning-Ndlovu’s A Coloured Place (In Perkins, 1999), Rehane Abrahams’ What the water gave me (In Fourie, 2006), Krijay Govender’s Women in Brown (In Chetty, 2002) and Muthal Naidoo’s Flight from the Mahabarath (In Perkins, 1999). This dissertation will in part engage character analyses of Bantu, Coloured and Indian female identities as articulated across the six play texts. Each category of black/ness will be explored in its own chapter, where the characters relevant to that particular black/ness shall be examined. This separation of chapters into these categories is by way of highlighting that endless differences in black/ness exist within the label ‘black’. While this particular separation of chapters is a perpetuation of apartheid discourse, as was the reality within South Africa’s history, and particularly from the emergence of the tricameral system onwards, the final chapter of this dissertation will be an attempt to dissolve these racial categories of black/ness as implemented by and within the legislation of the apartheid legacy. In a post-apartheid South Africa, it is not only Bantu women who are ‘black’, as Coloured and Indian women now claim ‘black’. This dissertation highlights the need to look at difference within similarity and multiplicity in the myriad black South African female identities that comprise the landscape of our contemporary, current and critical post-1994 theatre context, rather than to speak of a ‘typical’ black South African female identity. (1) This term will be italicised throughout this dissertation, by way of acknowledging its dual meaning. Within South Africa‟s historical context, „Bantu‟ was used as a derogatory term. The land set apart for black Africans during apartheid, known as Bantustans, affirms the disparaging nature of this term. Similarly, the belittling connotations of the term are noted in the system of Bantu education; a system specifically designed to fit the black African populace for their marginal role within apartheid society. For the purposes of this dissertation, the term „Bantu‟ will be used firstly, as a way to distinguish between the three categories of black/ness under exploration, where the term will be used to refer to black African South African identity, and secondly and most importantly, the term will be used as a reclaiming of black African South African identity from its historical derisive connotations. It is also important to note here, that within the isiZulu language, the term simply means „people‟. (2) During apartheid, there was a simplification of the term „black‟. This dissertation recognises that the apartheid stratifications of Bantu, Coloured and Indian, under the „logic‟ of grouping „like‟ together (that is, apartheid‟s „black‟ group), was in itself a false logic, because it did not acknowledge that there exists within each specific racial stratification, different cultural groupings and languages. For example, this dissertation could have expanded the discussion on Bantu identity by examining Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho etc identities, the discussion on Coloured identities could have included analyses of Javanese, Malay, Cape etc identities and the discussion on Indian identity could have explored different cultural groupings within Hindu, Muslim, Tamil etc. It is understood that in a post-apartheid context, there exists endless differences and multiplicities within the black identities of Bantu, Coloured and Indian. This dissertation therefore offers a terrain in which these myriad black/nesses are explored as fluid and contested. (3) Throughout this dissertation, the racial categorisations of „black‟ and „white‟ are in lower case „B‟ and „W‟ respectively, for the political demotion of these terms in a post-apartheid context. This is by way of politically challenging the essentialist thinking that underpinned the racial segregation and inequality primarily embodied by these terms during apartheid. The terms „Bantu‟, „Coloured‟ and „Indian‟ shall be in capital „B‟, „C‟ and „I‟ respectively. This is for the purpose of drawing attention to the categories of black/ness in a post-1994 context, whereby each is acknowledged and visible individually, as opposed to being articulated as part of the false logic of a homogeneous black/ness. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

This dissertation explores the potential of theatre studies to develop a pragmatic and relevant pedagogy for South African students and adults. The contention is that the dominant paradigm as conceptualized in the discipline ‘Speech and Drama’ is outdated. Section One offers a critique of this paradigm and an analysis of the premises that supported its foundation and consolidation in English-language South African Universities. Following this a search is instituted for a methodology of theatre studies which is both appropriate to present circumstances and which could encompass all South Africans. In Section Two, a survey of theories of performance is undertaken because a methodology of theatre studies is, of necessity, linked to performance theory. The pioneering contributions of some South African scholars are explained and evaluated as part of a larger body of theoretical analysis in both the humanities and the social sciences. In Section Three, the search for a methodology is approached from a different angle. The researcher offers a detailed descriptive analysis of her own work in the Department of Speech and Drama at the University of Zululand both among students and in a nearby rural community. This serves to explore the kinds of learning that occur through practical involvement in drama, theatre and specifically playmaking. These learning processes are related to the distinctive functions in drama and theatre, namely the heuristic, communicative and interpretative functions. The work is connected to progressivist trends in education and participatory research in the field of adult education. One of the intentions behind the work was, indeed, to challenge commonsense perceptions and discover the extent to which individuals are ‘victims of their own biography’. This challenge is specifically related to anti-feminist, racist and class perceptions. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for a learner-centred approach to theatre studies that is rooted in personal experience and consciously mediated through refined and extended conceptual categories. The tension between the development of students’ analytical powers and communicative skills is explored and a semiotic approach to analysis is posited. The importance of extending university work into the wider community is discussed and related to a rural development project involving playmaking, undertaken to research the potential of learning through drama for adults. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1987.

This dissertation examines three plays by South African theatre practitioner Brett Bailey as / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

Ellis and Bheki, the KwaZulu-Natal theatre duo of Ellis Pearson and Bheki Mkhwane (hereafter Mkhwane and Pearson), define their theatre as 'Theatre of the Imagination,' a hybrid (Hauptfleisch 1997: 49) of African and European performance styles. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

This dissertation explores the use of the Black performing body in the works Cards (2002) and Relativity: Township Stories (2006) by Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom and, iMumbo Jumbo (1997) and Big Dada: The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin (2001) by Brett Bailey. With specific reference to the colonial gaze, this dissertation attempts to locate the disruptions (if any) of the colonial gaze in these playwright-director's theatre. The first chapter provides an overview of South African Theatre history. This chapter examines postcolonial performance theory with regards to the past and the present situation in South African theatre. Locating postcolonial performance theory with postcolonial theory discourses and looking specifically at South African theatre history. It looks specifically at the effects of colonialism, not only in terms of economic and political disempowerment but also in terms of the psychological internalisation of subject position and identity. It provides a theoretical basis, through which critical analyses of both Bailey and Grootboom's work will occur. The second chapter examines the colonial gaze and the Black performing body. Jonathan Schroeder (1998: 58) believes that the gaze signifies “a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze.” In postcolonial theatre, through the transient nature of the performance language, one of the foci of this chapter of the dissertation is on how or whether colonial subjectivity can be re-envisioned: the disruption of the colonial gaze. In order to disrupt the colonial gaze, it becomes vital that the performing body on stage (should) become a key site of resistance. Postcolonial performance (and theory) aims to challenge the colonial imposition of identity through the human body in order for there to be a fragmentation of subjectivity. Postcolonial performance theory desires an important and effective meaning, particularly in the notions of representations and identities. The third chapter examines the work of Brett Bailey using the following two particular texts/ case studies and analysing them: iMumbo Jumbo (1997) and Big Dada (2001), in an attempt to locate disruptions of the colonial gaze with regards to the Black performing body or to expose the exoticism within the use of such notions as savage, primitive, strange, violent that are attached to the Black performing body in his works. In iMumbo Jumbo (1997), with an emphasis on the exotic, the sangomas, the ritual (real and performative), Bailey does incorporate indigenous performance forms into his postcolonial and intercultural theatre – however does the integration of these indigenous performance forms into a new theatre aesthetic subvert the colonial gaze? Or, rather, does it feed into a colonial fascination with African exoticism. Big Dada (2001) is a play about the rise and fall of Idi Amin – a ruthless dictator in Uganda who, according to Peter Stearns and William Langer (2001: 1064), caused a genocide which left over 300 000 Ugandans dead . This play has both violence and the exotic as signifiers attached to the black bodies performing. The fourth chapter examines the works of Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, focusing particularly on Cards (2002) and Relativity: Township Stories (2006). The analyses attempt to locate disruptions of the colonial gaze with regards to the Black performing body; or to expose the extreme violence and carnality that is attached to the Black performing body in his works. With regards to Cards (2002), the question asked is: does the use of the carnal, the raw, the sex, perpetuate a vicious cycle of colonial prejudices within South African audiences within what should be a postcolonial South African theatre arena? The colonised subject's body (in this case, the Black performer's body) has always been an “object of the coloniser's fascination and repulsion (and, in effect, possession) in sexual, pseudo-scientific and political terms” (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 203) (my italics). This chapter examines whether or not what is occurring in Grootboom's work/ theatre specifically is that the roles into which he has placed his Black performers are within racist discourses, “with perhaps even more emphasis on their supposed violence and sexuality” (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 208). This chapter seeks to interrogate whether or not Grootboom in casting the Other, the Black performing bodies, as corporeal, carnal, instinctual, raw... with his use of full nudity, simulated sex, simulated rapes, violence, explicit language, misogyny, obscenities, murder, drug use and religious rhetoric – has reintroduced colonial ideologies and stereotypes? Is his theatre 'black Black humour'? Reinforcing colonial ideologies of the savage? Or does Grootboom's theatre (unconsciously) aid the location of the (sometimes) nude, sexual, black performing body in the arena/ site of resistance in order to fracture the colonial gaze to further the aims of postcolonial theatre. Relativity: Township Stories (2006) is a brutal exposure of township life and the story revolves around a serial killer, the “G-String Strangler,” who is hunting down young women at night. The play traverses the bleaker and more desperate sides of human nature. As described by Robert Greig in The Sunday Independent (2005), Relativity is a panorama of extreme emotions and violence. However, does this perpetuation of the image of the Black as violent or attaching these signifiers of extreme violence challenge the colonial imposition of identity through the human body? Seeing the Black performing body being attached to notions of extreme violence begs to ask the question: Does this subvert the colonial gaze or does it feed into a stereotype of the violent, savage Black? This dissertation is to be read as an examination of both Brett Bailey and Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom's theatre and the motives for the use of the Back performing body on postcolonial South African theatre stages/ sites. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

"It was clearly the Government (by a great section of the electorate) that brought politics into the theatre, and we, the producers, the actors, the theatre-goers must pay the price for it." Alan Paton. This thesis attempts to analyse the way South African Theatre is developing against a background of social transition within a political framework which has enforced a policy of separate development based on racial distinction and ethnicity. Signs of political reform are beginning to show - not only as a result of pressure from within and without - but also because economic interdependency between the groups is breaking down barriers as the third world sector of the population aspires to the attractions of the first world urban sector. Polemical issues in the performing arts, which have risen out of the prevailing socio-economic climate, range from global attempts at cultural isolation of South Africa to such pragmatic matters as absorbing into actor-training programmes the various sectors of the community with their particular ethnic and linguistic identities preserved in an apartheid system. The research takes into account the history of the South African people and the various modes of theatre which have evolved as a result of natural and, later, imposed segregation of the various cultural groups. It examines, too, the dominant cuItural trends imported from Europe which have formed an infra-structure for South African theatre from training programmes to theatre managements, as well as criteria for critical assessment of theatre as a codified form of dramatic performance. It analyses the politically sensitive but vital issue of arts funding where most sponsorship emanates from public sources. It looks at actor-training programmes in terms of cultural service to the community and the diverse needs of the performance industry and takes into account the changing focus in some tertiary drama departments in an effort to adapt to transitional social conditions. It also takes cognisance of the prevailing mood of social consciousness amongst those artists who sense the need to move towards a theatre which expresses the collective experience of the South African situation. Whether this is possible in a country as culturally diverse as South Africa and whether the socio-political climate and reform measures which the government has adopted are conducive to the growth of a genre of theatre uniquely South African in its synthesis of endogenous and exogenous traditions - a theatre that will have cross-cultural appeal - is one of the major thrusts of this research. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1988.

Sounding the Body’s Meridian examines the ways in which notions of belonging are constructed through the display of bodies in performance, specifically the registers of private and public body that have been revealed in the theatre‟s attempts to locate a post-liberation notion of South African-ness in historical narrative. The author investigates various ideas of the imagined community constructed in postliberation performances of South African history as a form of embodied historical-social intervention. This investigation is undertaken with specific reference to claims that are made of South African identity in terms of its public culture, especially the inscription of nationalist ideology as a performative act that operates both upon and through the „citizen‟ bodies that it mediates. The study pursues a notion of the body so mediated, and (perceived) essential “characteristics” that describe its claims to authority and “authenticity”: the “meridian” or line of essential energy that activates its power to signify on behalf of other bodies like it in the debate and transaction of social values. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

The thesis affirms the relevance of "Theatre for Young Audiences" as a valid and distinctive genre; a performance genre that should entertain, educate and provide meaning in terms of its creative interaction with personal, social, artistic and cultural issues. The practice of playwrighting is removed from the assumption that it relies exclusively on inspiration, intuition and spontaneity; it is placed within a creative, experiential and discursive mode in which dramatic, theatrical, performance and structural issues can be researched, analysed and evaluated culminating in the crafting, making and presentation of innovative and challenging theatre. The research component of the thesis attempts to identify the social and moral responsibility of the playwright writing for young audiences. It is asserted that knowledge about the maturation of young people is crucial in the creative processes of writing plays and making theatre. The second chapter in Part One of the thesis, asserts that knowledge about the physical, emotional and intellectual maturation of the intended audience should clearly impact on the delineation of plot, action, character, language, audience participation, ethics and morality. The thesis clearly identifies the importance of this knowledge for the Arts Educator. However, "Theatre for Young Audiences" does not function solely in the realm of education. The thesis distinguishes this genre from those of "Theatre-in-Education" and "Drama-in-Education". The thesis firmly supports this distinction and affirms the status of "Theatre for Young Audiences" as a performing art. This argument is given further credence by the creative interaction of original scripts with the "living tradition" of the Commedia dell' Arte. The Commedia dell' Arte is examined from an historical perspective; pertinent features are addressed, selected, utilised and transformed into a dynamic theatrical experience for young audiences in contemporary South Africa. The Commedia dell' Arte serves as a theatrical model and becomes a creative device for further and renewed innovation. The inclusion of three original plays in Appendices 1, 2 and 3, plus numerous references to selected, original texts and performances provide an illustration of the concept that playwrighting for young people can effectively and imaginatively transpose theoretical inquiry into imaginative and challenging theatre experience. The thesis attempts to utilise a clear conceptual basis for the development of argument - the educational and psychological perspectives provide a foundation for ideas and critical writing. The theatre heritage becomes a catalyst for innovative and pertinent theatre that affirms the status, purpose and nature of "Theatre for Young Audiences" in contemporary South Africa. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.