Browsing by Author "Fleishman, Mark"

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    An African Dream Play = Isivuno Sama Phupha : reconstructing the spirit of ubuntu in the contemporary urban 'village' through theatre
    (2008) Mbothwe, Mandla; Fleishman, Mark
    My project proceeds from the question: What might an African Dream Play be for the 21 st Century? Or how might dreams be used to generate content and presentational form as well as to influence the way in which the audience experience or participate in the performance event? My interest in the African Dream Play lies in a belief that it might provide a means of reconstructing the spirit of ubuntu through theatre. It seeks - both in process and presentation - to include in this reconstruction, that which is popularly known as moral regeneration - which I see rather as spiritual regeneration. My contention is that we, and particularly young people, are living in a social and spiritual crisis and the African Dream Play attempts a trans formative intervention within the dynamic fabric of the contemporary urban 'village'-a space of many cultures, languages, ideologies and levels of economic status. This explication sets my practical research and the production Isivuno Sama Phupha in particular, in a theoretical framework and performance historical context. It draws on the theories of Victor Turner, specifically his concepts 'liminality' and 'communitas' and his idea of the social drama. It then traces the evolution of my theatrical research: first through an interest in cultural and religious practices prevalent in the townships around Cape Town and how they might be used to generate material for the theatre and an aesthetics of presentation that could stimulate the communitas experience for both the performers and the audience; then, on to dreams and how they might provide the stimulus for my envisaged theatre by utilizing an experience of their essential liminality.
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    Anarchival dance: choreographic archives and the disruption of knowledge
    (2020) Parker, Alan; Fleishman, Mark; Pather, Jayendran
    This thesis details a practice-led investigation of the archive, explored through choreography and the creation of three anarchival performances. The research theorises the anarchival as a creative research methodology for archival questioning and epistemological disruption, enacted through the body. Through a critically reflexive thinking-through of choreographic practice, alongside an interpretivist analysis of performance works by six contemporary South African artists, the thesis surfaces specific ways in which an anarchival disruption of the archive facilitates a re-thinking of colonially inherited knowledge systems, implicit in the archive. The research thus frames anarchival disruption within the broader decolonial project in South Africa as a necessary and valuable strategy for developing a decolonial archival praxis. Chapter One positions the archive in relation to poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques and establishes the archive as a system of knowledge production deeply implicated in the proliferation of colonial epistemologies and the subjugation of bodies and embodied ways of knowing. Chapter Two conceptualises the anarchive, through process philosophy and Deleuzian ontologies, as an alternative archive comprised of the virtual traces of the past that the traditional archive excludes. These traces constitute points of contact for creative research and, when engaged with through the body, become sites for recreation and reimagining. Chapters Three, Four and Five each explicate specific approaches to this encounter in creative practice, departing from three forms of archival remains: objects, bodies, and ghosts, respectively. The disruptive effects of these practices are then developed further through the analysis of specific performance works where related anarchival disruption is evident. Chapter Three considers affect as a disruptor of hierarchical divisions between subject and object in Steven Cohen's Put your heart under your feet… and walk!/To Elu (2017) and Dineo Seshee Bopape's Sa koša ke lerole (2017). Chapter Four analyses the blurring of past and present temporalities in Nelisiwe Xaba's The Venus (2009). In Chapter Five, Gavin Krastin's Rough Musick (2013), Sello Pesa's Limelight on Rites (2014) and Igshaan Adams' Bismillah (2014) are each examined as haunted temporalities where the living and the dead co-exist and affect one another.
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    Bakhutli: ancestors returning again, only this time as themselves
    (2024) Molekoa, Morapeleng; Fleishman, Mark; Seane Warona
    How can performance help us remember the past to imagine the future? This study is concerned with the recovery of historical knowledge through performance and the role of an audience in that process. Practice as Research (PaR) is used as a method to identify the role of ancestors in the world of the living. Through autoethnography, I draw examples and insights from my personal experiences with bongaka and my ongoing relationship with my ancestors. In addition, I use performance to enable an engagement between ancestors and the living through ritual process/performance. The ideal of sankofa is employed to frame the research and determine how ancestors could help us remember the past so that we, together with them, could imagine the future. I propose the concept of Bohareng as an alternative consideration of what the future could be viewed as in relation to performance. Performance projects and autoethnographic experiences in the form of field notes are incorporated to arrive at the findings of this study
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    Breath-Body-Self : an exploration of the body as a site for generating images for performance making
    (2016) Matchett, Sara; Fleishman, Mark
    This thesis investigates the body as a site for generating images for purposes of performance making. It is a methodological study that draws from various traditions, methods and somatic practices, such as yoga, Fitzmaurice Voicework®, the Sanskrit system of rasa, body mapping and free writing. The study specifically focuses on interrogating the relationship between breath and emotion, and breath and image, in an attempt to make performance that is inspired by a biography of the body. It explores the relationship between body, breath and feeling and how this impacts on the imagination in processes of generating images for performance making. It further investigates whether breath can be experienced as an embodied element that is sensed somatically by performers, and in so doing act as a catalyst for activating memories, stories, and experiences held in the body of the performer. The potential of breath as impulse as well as thread that connects imagination, memory, body, and expression, is investigated. Using the conceptual framework of somaesthetics, the study draws from theories of the body, neuroscience and cognitive philosophy to support its claims. Through the disciplinary framework of somaesthetics, as an embodied philosophical practice, it is suggested that the performer cultivates a heightened awareness that makes possible what is being proposed as a process of performance making. It draws on my experience as a lecturer of theatre in the Department of Drama at the University of Cape Town as well as on my experience as a maker of performance with The Mothertongue Project, a women's arts collective I co-founded in South Africa in 2000. My work with The Mothertongue Project, emanates from a particular ideological position in the world that is informed by the context in which I locate. South Africa has some of the highest rates of rape and sexualised violence against women in the world. The result is a society where women's bodies, in particular, are constantly under threat of being violated. In summary, this thesis explores the relationship between a particular kind of performance making process for a particular kind of work within a particular kind of context. It seeks to provide women with the tools and space to speak back to the social context they inhabit. The choice to include a creative project as a case study alludes to the synergetic relationship between theory and practice. One that is cyclical; one that speaks directly to the method of image generation for purposes of performance making that is being proposed, where the route between breath, body, emotion and image, maps a circular trajectory.
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    Bringing dance into the realm of theatre : Making sense differently for actors and audiences
    (2014) Kweyama, Mdunyiswa; Fleishman, Mark
    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'.
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    Creating resonance in emptiness with visual theatre : how the metaphorical potential of puppets, objects and images in theatre can be used to explore the constructed nature of reality and the complexity of the self
    (2007) Younge, Janni; Fleishman, Mark
    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.
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    DNA - Deconstructing Native Affairs: New Equations
    (2019) Manyaapelo, Jacqueline Kehilwe; Fleishman, Mark
    This study is an exploration of the articulation of my artistic voice or performance signature. It employs two methodologies, autoethnography and Practice as Research to investigate the practice of my artistic creations as a solo dance-maker. It utilises concepts such as the Batammaliba’s anatomical and metaphorical approach to architecture, Sankofa and decoloniality to frame the investigation. My first solo work, Satisfaction Index, is a point of departure for this analysis. The study then proceeds to engage with works created during the pursuit of this master’s degree over the past two years. In the discovery of my work, DNA and ritual feature to further construct the artistic voice or performance signature that I seek for the articulation of my rebranding as a soloist.
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    An examination of the relation of scientific thought to changing notions of time, space and character in 20th century drama: Chekov, Beckett, Foreman
    (2013) Wilsenach, Coba†Maryn; Fleishman, Mark
    This study examines and investigates the relation of scientific thought to changing notions of time, space and character in twentieth†century drama. The aim of the study is to illustrate the influence scientific thought had on the zeitgeist of the twentieth†century and how this in turn is reflected through the drama in the treatment of the dramatic elements of time, space and character. The focus of the study rests on three case studies, each of which can be seen as a precursor to the following in a linear timeline of the development of twentieth†century drama. The analysis of the three texts, namely Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Go dot and Richard Foreman's Bad Boy Nietzsche, will show how the philosophical notions of the twentieth†century, namely relativity, uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox, complexity and causality (which stemmed from the changing worldview offered by the theory of relativity) is reflected in the dramatists' handling of the notions of time, space and character.
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    I am also here: Invisible Insurrections in temporary autonomous zones – a haunting
    (2022) James, Qondiswa; Pather, Jayendran; Fleishman, Mark
    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.
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    I'm not going back to the Township; Re-imagining 'trauma' as tragedy.
    (2023) Hlongwane, Thapelo; Fleishman, Mark; Mbothwe Mandla
    In the place of wound, healing must take place. But how do you heal if you're presently living in a wound? How do you heal if you have lost touch with the other? This research responds to trauma through the tragic form of theatre, it understands tragedy as a means in performance to try to foster healing using the practice of performance as a mode of research. It argues that as a practice, theatre making in the South African context is affected by traumatic experience and to engage with trauma, requires social and historical relations to be considered. The research focuses on how African oral traditions, modern poetics and music might be used as a process of re-imagining the tragic form and utilising it to better understand how theatre making can hold space and safely lead the process of healing without re-traumatizing the participants.
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    Imag(in)ing the poetic body : a directorial approach to heightening text(ure) in performance.
    (2012) Bye, Lara; Fleishman, Mark
    This thesis is the enquiry of a Director of text-based work in search of a more heightened physical texture in staging written text. Inspired by Jacques Lecoq’s use of the idea of the Poetic Body, this enquiry is the Director’s attempt to discover what this ‘Poetic Body’ might mean, and how imagining the Poetic Body and the country/landscape/territories this body might inhabit or occupy, can be useful to the Director in preparing a rehearsal process, and in the ultimate staging of the text for performance.
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    Isililo sikaNandi: imagining dithyrambic dirge to performatively score the precarity of blackwomnhood
    (2022) Nkonyeni, Zamah Martiniah; Fleishman, Mark
    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.
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    'Knowing Performance: Performance as Knowledge Paradigm for Africa'
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Fleishman, Mark
    This article expands Chantal Mouffe's critique of the 'post-political' as a space in which the partisan model of politics has been overcome and there is no possibility of alternatives, to the realm of knowledge production. It questions the prevalent position that there are no alternatives to orthodox knowledge paradigms and suggests the possibility that performance constitutes an alternative way of knowing - both in respect of its representations but also with regard to its embodied practice. It suggests that performance as a knowledge paradigm is particularly appropriate to Africa and argues that it capitalises on our historical legacies and our particular niche advantage in the humanities.
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    Kwasukasukela : a practical exploration of Nguni oral storytelling traditions on contemporary physical forms of storytelling for theatre
    (2001) Madlala, Ntokoza; Fleishman, Mark
    The present study is a written explication of the production Kwasukasukela created and staged by the author in September 2001. The production involved a practical exploration of the impact of the Nguni storytelling tradition on contemporary physical form of storytelling for theatre. In the introduction, the terms of the study: the Nguni storytelling tradition and contemporary physical forms of storytelling, are defined. The theoretical proposal is then laid out, followed by a performance historical context for the study focusing on the works of Herbert Dhlomo, Mbongeni Ngema and Gcina Mhlophe. The final section provides a discussion of the creative methods employed and the discoveries made through the process of creating and staging Kwasukasukela. The study concludes that the bringing together of the Nguni storytelling tradition and contemporary physical forms of storytelling, in the context of a theatrical production, causes changes in both forms, giving rise to a hybrid third form which provides opportunities for the creation of new subject position in theatre practice in South Africa for more critical representations of identity and history.
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    Lessons from an aftermath : recovery of the self through trans-disciplinary applied drama practice
    (2008) Taub, Myer; Fleishman, Mark
    The aftermath is a region that is often associated with disruption, disrepair and trauma. Taking as his departure point his witnessing of the specific aftermath of the September 11th attacks in New York– the author returns to South Africa to locations that are concerned with the aftermath of apartheid and the aftermath of the advent of HIV/AIDS i.e. education and public health. He attempts a method of extracting elements from an aftermath as a form of redemptive critical theory (see Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Maurizio Passerin D’Entreves) in order to apply a combination of elements into a dialogical method of dramatic practice that might provide opportunities for recovery. This he does through a practice that is based upon participatory research involving participants from a high school and an HIV/AIDS wellness clinic.
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    Locks
    (2002) Barnes, Stephen; Fleishman, Mark
    LOCKS is the story of a young woman trying to take authorship of her life. Hers is one of three story·strands that interweave, each protagonist vying for personal significance within that plait. L's sphere of experience is contained within the room she has grown-up in, her only companion an elderly woman, Marmalade, who has educated her through the allegories of fairy tales. Unaware of an accessible outside world, all references to a world beyond her experience are relegated to the fairytale mythology of knights and slavering wolves.
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    Ma, performing the White, Afrikaner Woman back to self
    (2021) Viljoen, Kanya; Fleishman, Mark
    This research project seeks to understand myself and my position within South Africa. The position of a young, white, Afrikaner woman. This is a position that, one could argue, inherently carries a sense of a tragedy within it. The project seeks to understand how the elements of tragedy, such as conflict and transgression, in turn, can be employed in my performance-making practice to question the very identity I hold. The research recounts the histories and narratives that have been constructed around the white, Afrikaner woman in South Africa, specifically with regards to a paradoxical positionality in the white, Afrikaner woman's ‘role' in the construction of the white, Afrikaner identity. Furthermore, it seeks to understand how narratives and histories embed themselves within nostalgic objects that centralise around the white, Afrikaner woman. Utilising the very narratives and objects that have constructed the white, Afrikaner woman, I create performances that seek to use these objects, including the Afrikaans language itself, and my own body, to transgress and abject the notions of the border, my body, and subjectto-object and object-to-subject relationality within this very identity I hold. During these performances and moments of transgression and abjection, I argue that liminal moments in which I can re-imagine myself are encountered and experienced. These moments are often fleeting and exist as attempts at re-imagining myself, but so too hold the ability to affect and shift something within my own understanding of self. Finally, the research seeks to understand how these very positionalities and performances are related to the tragic and tragedy; catastrophe and the notion of the wreckage, as theorised by Walter Benjamin (1968), Hans-Thies Lehmann (2016) and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2016) and how these theories might speak to an understanding of my identity and positionality in South Africa, my understanding of self.
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    Mask Performance and The Imaging Consciousness: The relationship between body and non-body in performance
    (2019) Isaacs, Iman; Fleishman, Mark
    This study employs Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of the ‘analogon’ and the imaging consciousness to develop the relationship between body and object in mask performance (Sartre, 1948:23). I suggest that the idea of the analogon allows for the body to be extended through, or invested into, objects to make new bodies (Shephard 2006: 150). These new bodies can possess multiple functions, when in relation to one another, one of which is to create metaphorical imagery which aids the development of story in the audience’s imaging consciousness. The study proposes that the analogon has the ability to pull the audience’s consciousness into a space that lies between the real and the fantastical, a space that can be defined as the imaginary. Furthermore, the study explores the idea that the combination of the imaging consciousness, the analogon and mask technique, through improvisational play, via negativa and transposition, can be utilized as a methodology towards developing the physical body as a mode of communication. This methodology extends the relationship between bodies and non-bodies (Shephard, 2006: 150) in mask performance, and uses this as a means of generating metaphorical images in order to make the imaginary world (which I refer to as story) come alive in the audience’s imaging consciousness
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    Mnemonic sketches: Utopias of mourning in contemporary South African performances of tragedy
    (2025) Chauke, Lesego Thabang; Fleishman, Mark
    This multidisciplinary study locates, at its centre and at the centre of tragedy more broadly, the notion of chorus. My orientation around chorus in this study is based on the one hand, in performance- as in the live moment of present encounter- and on the other hand, in the local context of contemporary South Africa. In this feat, I survey a range of case studies that mobilise chorality in notable aesthetic and political ways. Fundamental to my own definition of tragedy is the idea of mourning. Here, mourning is not simply something done by characters in a tragic performance. As we will see in the chapters that follow, mourning becomes an orientation toward and away from history, it comes to name the complex relationship between making history and being in history. I attempt, in chapters one and two, to outline the ways in which tragedy and mourning may be understood as collective structures of experience that shape individual perceptual possibilities. Upon establishing the context in which this study unfolds, which is also the task of the first two chapters, I mobilize even as I agitate, foundational concepts of tragedy in their mimetic and diegetic applications. I then turn my attention toward the notion of utopia, in and beyond performance, in chapter three, arguing for chorus as its own structure of experience that, if allowed to settle its debt to tragedy, can shape individual perceptual possibilities. Chapter four takes on a performance analysis methodology to probe the concept of the archive as a tool for performative and performance historiography. The final chapter turns towards my own performance works produced over the course of the study. Here, I discuss the notion of mimesis as a particular orientation towards history and historiography. The research takes practice- as-research and literary/performance analysis as its primary methodologies. These two approaches are anchored by an ethnographic process which not only seeks out external subjects but calls attention to my own subject position as a researcher engaged in an ethnographic project. Ultimately, my understanding of tragedy finds articulation in the convergence of the three key concepts, namely utopia, mimesis, and the archive, towards a theory of contemporary tragedy anchored in a non-Western framework.
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    Negative dramaturgies and the development of productive negation
    (2019) Hartmann, Zee; Fleishman, Mark
    The content of this dissertation is a cognitive map of divergent methodologies that contributed to the creation of a practice based on physical and conceptual, academic and non-academic, modes of knowledge-making and knowledge-gathering. I will show how the act of negating, whether verbally or through conceptual strategies, elucidates the untapped potential of dance- or theatre-making processes. Weaving together a collection of ideas by academics, thinkers and makers from a variety of disciplines, together with the design of my own negative dramaturgy (which I have preliminarily coined here as Productive Negation), I aim to bring the omniscient negativity of dramaturgy into focus as a mobilizing, dynamic strategy for invention. The act of negation embodies a powerful force of conviction that clarifies muddled subjectivity popular in art criticism today, and yet it leaves enough room for focused investigation. This can be seen in the proposed four-step working model of Productive Negation based on Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. Far from being an in-depth discourse on theories of negation, Productive Negation is a methodology that attempts to marry theoretical and practical applications through the interpretive voice of the dramaturg in a collaborative environment.