Browsing by Author "Mbothwe, Mandla"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    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.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Open Access
    (Re)storing and (Re)storying men with broken wrists: using intsomi as critical fabulation to refute the notion of queerness as un-African
    (2025) Nyezi, Freddy Junior Sikhanyiso; Mtshali, Mbongeni; Mbothwe, Mandla
    My research attempts to challenge the contemporary perception of homosexuality as “un-African”. This misconception is often grounded in the perceived absence of queer people of colour from the “archive” of black African (hi)stories that shape our collective understandings of who is and who is not properly “African”. Given that what we do know of how gender is conceived among African societies comes to us predominantly via the colonial archive with all its attendant elisions and lacunae, there is a strong case to be made for treating these histories and the authority they assume in defining our contemporary politics of belonging with some scepticism. Accordingly, I (re)turn to the archive of indigenous African folktales as a means to challenge cultural myths of queer black (un)belonging. In my final thesis project, I take the Xhosa ntsomi (folktale) seriously as a mode of producing and transmitting cultural knowledge and appropriate its formal aesthetics to create queer speculative fictions/myths that subvert neocolonial heteropatriarchy and the attempted erasure of black queer personhood from the story of Africa. Using the culturally embedded formal and narrative tropes of intsomi alongside techniques of biomythography and critical fabulations to queer the neocolonial archive, I work to “(re)store” and “(re)story” black queer African personhood, affirming its complicated place in African society and the visions of freedom and belonging animated by our shared histories of anti-/decolonial struggle.