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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 (leaves 96-100). / The present study, which will investigate three works of Benjamin Britten for mezzosopranos, is envisaged as an aid to interpreters wishing to gain further insights into these works. The study focuses on three vocal works of varying genre: The Rape of Lucretia, A Charm of Lullabies, and Phaedra. The investigation of each work starts with the historical background, in wh ich Britten's life and career at the time of the work is discussed briefly, including reviews of the work. The performers and librettists, who were involved in the composition, are also discussed. Secondly, an analytical survey is done on the text and music for each work. Brief background notes on the writers and poets, and on their style, influences and intentions, are included. The historical background of each text is explored, as well as the role of the character within the narrative, dramatic or literary/poetic context. The musical characteristics of each work are highlighted, which reveal stylistic aspects of Britten's writing. The influence of each work's genre (chamber opera, song cycle and solo cantata) on the interpretation of text and character is discussed, as well as how the voice is accompanied. Lastly, a comparative survey of different recorded portrayals of each work looks at the background history, and approach of the various performers, as well as their advice to other performers.

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.

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'.

Includes bibliographical references. / Inspired by the performativity of Xhosa cultural belief systems, my study aims to develop dignified theatrical roles for African women. This essay explores the potential of perceptions of Xhosa cultural women, configured in oral storytelling, as a means towards developing a base for Nguni theatre. This explication speaks to the capacities of African women models in re-shaping an ancient storytelling tradition for the development of South African theatre. The focus is on the recordings of a late matriarch, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani's storytelling sessions in Xhosa and the possibilities these present for a post-apartheid and postcolonial South African theatre stage. This research traces the boundaries set by the Xhosa culture, first on women, and secondly on performance. It unlocks the meaning and the significance of traditional song and dance, space, audience and stage properties, and the actual and potential uses of each of these aspects in making an Nguni classical theatre. The explication develops a vocabulary for theatrical performance derived from a rural South African perspective and explored in an urban setting. It establishes commonalities between the stories - narrated and performed - and the audience, concerning issues pertaining to (Xhosa) womanhood in post-apartheid South Africa.