Browsing by Author "Stopford, Clare"

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    Considering rhythms of emotional proximity: an alternative approach to directing theatre in a violent society
    (2015) Herbst, Rone; Stopford, Clare
    This inquiry is concerned with realistic representations of violence on stage within a South African context. Inside this broad frame I focus on why this directorial approach is a problem and I propose a possible solution in a directorial intervention with mise-en-scène, which attempts to regulate the audience's emotional immersion and distance through theatre apparatus. This notion is supported both by Psychological research into the problem of violence in South Africa, and by Theatre and Performance studies, with author Lilie Chouliaraki (2013) arguing for the "in-between" of theatre as a means to approaching violence. Conceptually, I propose working with theatre apparatus in a spatial triad, which is located within Peter Brook's ideas around an "empty space", the post-Brechtian according to David Bennett, which is concerned with both distance and emotional immersion, and the spatial trialectics of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, who argue for the insertion of a "thirdspace" in order to counter the limited workings of binaries. This conceptual frame translates into praxis in the form of theatre apparatus such as interruption and disruption of the narrative, working with metaphor and gesture, "playing" with time, duration and repetition and working towards moments of extreme intensity before a pause is inserted into the action. I propose these apparatus as the findings of a series of Practice as Research projects which formed part of this study, and as the tools for my final Thesis Production. This project will take place in November, 2015 in the form of an adaptation of a novel, where my objective will be to create a rhythm of emotional audience involvement. My aim is to test whether the apparatus I have discovered in this study are able to regulate the emotional proximity of the audience to the violence on stage, hopefully providing an alternative approach to working with violence in an already violent society.
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    Mise en scène as a feminine textual body : making meaning in new plays
    (2013) Stopford, Clare; Morris, Gay
    This study proceeds from research I have conducted through autobiographical writing, into my experiences of directing untried play texts for first performance. The question of ownership of the meaning conveyed by the play in performance, in the negotiated space between the writer and the director, provides the frame for this discussion. Who has the right of ownership over meaning, and in times of dissension about meaning, whose meaning should prevail? Since it is the writer's first opportunity to see his or her play on the stage, it would seem that the ethics of the situation favour the writer. However, if the director's modality is unconscious, intuitive and 'felt' as mine is, the best and most ethical path to follow may be hard to discern by both director and writer. At the same time, the intuitive modality of the director may be destabilized by the presence of the writer. Within this conundrum my focus is on identifying, exploring and considering the director's modality, which I have identified as 'feminine', a term which in this text favours sexual differentiation as a feminist strategy for the re-creation and re-inscription of woman within a male dominated signifying system. Rosi Braidotti's evocation of Cixous' creative writing as a 'feminine textual body' in resistance to woman as 'non-said', and as procreation of woman as a subject, provides the inspiration for the conceptualization of mise en scène as a feminine textual body. Using Green Man Flashing written by Mike Van Graan and directed by me in 2004, and Lara Foot's Reach that I directed in 2007, as case studies, I consider, as well as assess the impact, of my feminine directorial modality on these two performance texts. I am interested in how meaning is made from inside the feminine modality, what meaning is made, and finally, how the feminine modality is affected by the material circumstances in which these two plays were rehearsed. My aim is to extend the feminine modality into the style of it's dissemination by taking the reader into the 'feeling' of the modality in a style of writing that embodies the personal, intimate, intuitive qualities it invokes. I also take a more analytical view, assessing the efficacy of the feminine modality by using the lenses of materialist feminists such as Dolan and Diamond, as well as Irigaray's 'relational alterity'. The outcome of this exploration is that the feminine modality is both a solution and a problem, depending on material circumstances. Its paradoxical nature requires a third space in which it can stabilize, and yet remain accessible to the unconscious.
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    Performing Masculinities: Stereotypes and representations of the male body in contemporary South Africa
    (2019) Manamela-Mogane, Owen; Stopford, Clare
    In this account of my practise as research into the crisis of masculinity among black males in South Africa, I am concerned with how men oppress and terrorize women and retard the recovery of South Africa from apartheid through crime, violence and transgressive actions. Following Sirkin (1984) in this paper I term this behaviour ‘hypermasculine’ and attribute it to the unfathomable violence inflicted on the black male body and psyche during apartheid while Danieli, (2007) and Goodman’s (2013) ‘transgenerational trauma’ accounts for why the condition persists. Butler’s idea of gender as a ‘performance’ theoretically grounds the hypermasculine body as a ‘mask’ behind which lies either a true and better male self or ‘shadow’– Seriti – or no self at all. Following this premise, I give an account of the creative process and performance of two PaR pieces (Seriti and Metsi) in which I unpack both the process and performances in which my own black male body was the medium for the research. I sketch my objectives of physically inhabiting the hypermasculine ‘performative’ stereotypes familiar to me from childhood township memories as well as in township theatre in order to define and ‘know’ them. Through exercises in weight, tempo and repetition I hoped to re-inscribe the misshapen figure of the black male. I discuss how working with an older black actor in Seriti yielded valuable insights into cultural male hierarchies, while the enactment of hypermasculinity took its toll necessitating mediation through traditional ritual. I recount how, with the need for healing now evoked in my body, and with an obsession in the shape of water, (Metsi) in the second research project I allowed the memory of the positive feminine presences in my past to inflect the male body with a different weight and shape in a disruption of the familiar and a glimpse of the potential of a new shape or self.
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    Reflections on a body of work/water: re-membering the post-slave female body through performance practice
    (2017) Abrahams,Rehane; Stopford, Clare; Mtshali, Mbongeni
    This study attempts to ‘re-member' the post-slave South African female body through personal performance practice. It addresses re-membering both as an embodied activity of Recalling erased memory and as a recuperation of the dis-membered post-slave female body. Through reflecting on two examples of personal performance practice, What the Water Gave Me (2000) and Spice Root (2005), I use my own post-slave body as the locus of Intersection between the private and the political, the biological and the historical. The transmission of cultural memory through performance is traced through Joseph Roach's (1996) ‘surrogation' and Diana Taylor's (2003) ‘Repertoire'. Specifically, I employ a syncretic spirituality and objects of cultural memory to re-member a diasporic narrative continuity and recuperate embodied feminine agency. Gabeba Baderoon's (2014) perspective on the Indian Ocean as site of colonial slavery and cultural memory across diaspora and Raissa De Smet Trumbull's (2010) monograph on ‘Oceanic liquidity' inspire a figuration of the Ocean as an embodied, affective, anti-colonial presence. These modalities also inflect the style of writing in my inquiry, thus privileging the material/maternal, cyclical, leaky and excessive qualities of water a counter-hegemonic practice.