Browsing by Author "Mahali, Alude"

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    A Museum of Bottled Sentiments: the ‘beautiful pain syndrome’ in twenty-first century Black South African theatre making
    (2014) Mahali, Alude; Morris, Gay; Sitas, Ari
    This study is about contemporary black theatre makers and theatre making in the 'now moment'; this moment of recovery and gradual transition after the fall of apartheid in South Africa. The 'now moment', for these theatre makers, is characterized by a deliberate journey inward, in a struggle towards self-determination. The 'now moment' is the impulse prompting the 'beautiful pain syndrome', and through performances of uncomfortable attachments and rites of passage, generates and dwells in the syndrome. Uncomfortable attachments are unsettlement and anxiety wrought by the difficulty of the 'now moment'. These manifest in the work of Black South African-based contemporary theatre makers, Mandla Mbothwe, Awelani Moyo, Mamela Nyamza and Asanda Phewa, within the duality of the 'beautiful pain syndrome'. The 'beautiful pain syndrome' is a cultural dis-ease revealed by the individual theatre makers through the aesthetic interpretation, or beautiful consideration of inherently painful material – a condition or predicament that best contains and yet attempts to unpack this shifting impulse of the 'now' moment. The works around which this study revolves, namely Mbothwe's Ingcwaba lendoda lise cankwe ndlela (the grave of the man is next to the road) (2009), Moyo's Huroyi Hwang – De/Re Composition (2007), Nyamza's Hatched (2009) and Phewa's A Face Like Mine (2008) are rites of passage works, representing a passage or transition from one phase of life to another, which occurs on multiple levels. Through guiding thinking tools, which include intuition, my own positioning, observation and comparative and cultural performance analysis, the four selected works are described, probed and, interrogated; with their purposes and poetics investigated and articulated in different ways. The study does not complete the assignment of unpacking the four works but continues to wonder and worry at them, while investigating a particular aesthetic of dis-ease through the artistic assemblage of symbolic categories. These rites of passage works reflect or echo the transitions in the country's shifting identity, along with the identities of the individuals who inhabit it.
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    Piercing together a girlhood : (re)visiting memories of site using nostalgia as a catalyst for coping with atopia
    (2009) Mahali, Alude; Fleishman, Mark
    My research has been preoccupied with the playing of memory with reference to narratives of loss. This loss has been represented by a loss of language, place and family, resulting in the playing of unnerving memory fragments. The primary driving force of this loss has been the notion of a disrupted or uprooted childhood. The subject of this enquiry is black girlhood; in particular, the relationships between black girls/women. Consequently a large part of 'piecing together a girlhood' involves engaging with what Quashie (2004) calls the 'girlfriend aesthetic'. Quashie's 'girlfriend aesthetic' offers a methodology for re-membering by providing a reflective surface; you see in the experience of the girlfriend other something that triggers or incites your own memory that aids you in working towards completion of self. This explication traces my interest in this subject matter as a direct result of feeling that black girlhood as a topic is under-represented, explores my development of a viable creative methodology for this kind of work, interrogates the meaning of 'site' in this context, maps out the origin of nostalgia and how it affects the afficted in relation to lost 'site', unpacks the girlfriend aesthetic as a practice and reveals how the nostalgic searcher's obsession with the irrecoverability of the past manifests in corporeal ways. Whether or not completion of self is possible, what is discovered is theatre's ability to aid in coping with a feeling of placelessness or atopia. Although nostalgia may indicate a fixation with the past, it can be a valuable and restorative way of emancipating oneself from it.