Browsing by Subject "drama"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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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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    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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    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.
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    Of place and playmaking: working with everyday city spaces through theatre and performance
    (2018) Halligey, Alexandra; Fleishman, Mark
    This thesis proposes theatre and performance as tools for understanding the relational emergence of city spaces. It responds to two related urban studies calls. The first is for fine-grained ethnographies of the everyday to learn what city spaces might be becoming in order to strategise how to support these becomings. The second falls under the ‘cultural turn’ in urban thinking: what artistic projects might offer an everyday urbanism. Through an everyday urban lens, the work asserts the performativity of daily actions in constructing space, but also the affectual qualities that daily city life produces. These affectually charged, spatial constructions through the interrelation of daily activity are what make spaces become places, places that are temporary and always evolving. This thesis draws a link between everyday placemaking practices and the artistic practice of playmaking to propose theatre and performance as a way of learning about city spaces, actively engaging with this knowledge and broadcasting it. It argues that theatre and performance staged in the sites it seeks to know and in concert with city dwellers has the capacity to facilitate an embodied, but reflective experience of what it is to be continually implicated as a city dweller in spatial – and therefore place – construction through daily actions. The work takes as its primary focus a year-long participatory theatre and performance project run in the Johannesburg inner city suburbs of Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith’s Paarl, resulting in a ‘site-specific’ play performed in the streets of the area. The practical component to the study is contextualized within the broader landscape of Johannesburg public art interventions over the last 15 years and specifically in relation to two other Johannesburg-based participatory public art projects: Terry Kurgan’s Hotel Yeoville and a series of public art commissions managed by The Trinity Session. The research uses Tim Ingold’s notion of corresponding with materiality in order to know as a methodology in service of understanding cities through their relational construction. This phronetic approach – knowing through doing – is applied to interpreting Kurgan’s and The Trinity Session’s work and to both the making of the theatre project in Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith’s Paarl and the writing of this thesis. The study takes place at the intersection between urban studies, theatre and performance studies and public art. It draws together the socially-engaged concerns and considerations of all three fields to propose theatre and performance as a public art form offering a mode of productive, robust engagement with the contemporary urban moment.