Mnemonic sketches: Utopias of mourning in contemporary South African performances of tragedy

Chauke, Lesego Thabang

Mnemonic sketches: Utopias of mourning in contemporary South African performances of tragedy

Thesis / Dissertation

2025

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Centre for Film and Media Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

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.

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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