Culture and Performance

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1996
Place: London
Type of Product: Book Review
Published: In Media development, 3/1996, 44-45.
Copyright: Media Development
Author David Kerr is well known for his highly textured empirical studies of expressive African media in film, radio and performance. What sets him apart from the average descriptive work, however, is his keen sense of colonial history coupled with an obvious theoretical ability. This conceptual content is usually implicit in his dramatic narratives of the topics under study. This makes for relatively easy, and highly engaging, reading.

The scope of Kerr’s book is enormous. It covers theatre in precolonial and colonial times (Chapters 1 and 2). The second chapter explains that theatre in Africa is derived from the colonial theatre of school drama and elitist theatre clubs. Chapter 3 critically examines the reactions of indigenous African theatre to colonialism. Indigenous forms adapting to colonialism remained within the ambit of peasant consciousness. Kerr’s analysis of syncretic adaptions of popular theatre in militaristic, concert party genres and Yoruba opera in Chapters 4 and 5 reveal the growth of forms of performance which could mediate the experiences of modernisation, urbanisation and class formation. Chapter 6 on literary drama deals with attempts at decolonising theatre and the search for indigenous structures and dramatic forms. The travelling theatre movement is the subject of Chapter 7, which includes discussion on relationship between performers and audience.

The wider mode of drama known as `theatre for development’ is examined in Chapter 8. This is a crucial analysis which foregrounds the role of drama in community renewal, a form of intervention which is usually beyond the comprehension of economists, bureaucrats and other state and agency officials. Like these so-called agents of change, performers in travelling theatre groups also exhibit contradictory class positions, especially if they are working for the state.

Popular theatre and macro/micro-media is examined in terms of the Philippines experience. The PETA group argue that less capital intensive, more interactive `micro-media’ are more effective than the expensive macro-media controlled by bureaucrats from afar.

The manipulation of popular forms of expression in the forging of nation-building or a national consensus often brings popular theatre into an uneasy relationship with the state. The transformation of pre-colonial or syncretic forms into an instrumentalist imperative is termed `populist’ theatre by Kerr in Chapter 10.

Chapter 11 deals with theatre in struggle and liberation in Southern Africa: Zambia, Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mozambique are briefly covered.The last Chapter. “Towards a Theatre of Popular Struggle” rounds off the tome. Here Kerr evaluates the effectiveness of theatre in social-change and political struggle, and again illustrates his arguments with empirical examples.

Kerr’s book is evidence of extraordinary scholarship which is accessibly written and engagingly argued. This work complements his equally detailed historical analyses on indigenous performance, radio and cinema already published in Critical Arts: a Journal for Cultural Studies. His cross-referencing, indexing, and endnoting constantly illustrate theory with examples, and he draws correspondences between different groups, movements and practitioners throughout the African continent as a whole. Kerr’s analysis is not only historically contextualised, but the discussion of theatre is also related to other media which it impacts, and which impact it: radio, cinema and television. This is an important work which goes far beyond solely literary or dramatic criticism; it is one which examines texts in terms of their contexts, and which is conscious of broader social, historical, and economic processes which have given shape to African popular theatre.

Keyan G Tomaselli

University of Natal, Durban

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1981
Published: SA Labour Bulletin 6 (8) 1981 pp. 64-70
Copyright: SA Labour Author
South African society is unique, politically it is complex, socially it is contradictory, economically it is divided by class and artistically it is still in a state of becoming. Televisually, we are a controlled media experiment, cinematically we are ideologically guided, and artistically we are escapist and safe in our landscapes and wildlife, or brutal and superficial in our tortured political sculpture and contorted images. On a theatrical level, the dominant class is bereft of ideas as is indicated by the continual resurrections of Shakespear who is generally refined beyond redemption, or we plunder the surface of reality of biographical and psychological detail, encoding them into o bedroom farces or the endless permutations of Alan Auckbourn. The result is, “thee-tah” rather than theatre, esoterica rather than life and escape rather than confrontation. Theatre in Western consumer society has lost sight of its roots, it has become a commodity and willingly trades off its integrity for profit. Its educational function as identified by the ancient Greeks is lost and replaced by the gladiatorial competition of Roman circuses where the audiences are fed the gory ostentatious results of their social systems consequent upon the economic interests of big business. What was horror to the gladiators and Christians being devoured by the lions was normal to the Romans who, morally corrupt, elevated such inhumanity to the level of ‘entertainment ‘. In South Africa, for example, where there was once the inviolate ancestral grounds of Chief Pilane’s tribe, there is now ‘Sun City’ , populated not by Roman lions, but with ‘Mangope’s (wild) pets’ , and frequented by gauche white South African ‘foreigners’ , ¹ armed with their ‘passport to pleasure ‘ who are aspiring to enter the glittering gateways of the international set.

It is this concept of ‘entertainment’ which has bedeviled dramatic criticism since capitalism subsumed the dramatic form as a commodity. Theatre is now measured in terms of its entertainment value and box office returns. Performance per se has been replaced by the performance of the box office, an inevitable consequence when ‘art ‘ is penetrated by capital and transformed into a commodity. As such, it is accessible mainly to the privileged strata of society since it is unlikely that the working class is able to afford the admission prices or be able to identify with what goes on on the stage. This type of theatre is thought to have something to do with ‘refining the senses’, with ‘intellectual development’ and with ‘cultural advancement ‘. All of these functions appear to be necessarily esoteric, requiring a divorce from the very life from which theatre draws its origin and sustenance. This dislocation is further enhanced by Western technology which has removed us from our roots substituting a mediated reality by rarifying experience into metaphor, offering relations of likeness rather than connecting the spectator through metonymy where he/she becomes a participant in the performance itself. In such cases the emphasis is on the part-whole relationship of art and life. Technology has many forms: architecture, interior design, computers, lasers, revolving stages. overhead lighting grids, cranes, spotlights, houselights etc. A corollary of this type of technology and theatre architecture can be found in the linguistic structuresof everyday life which sock to separate out ‘backstage’ from the ‘frontstage’, performers from audience, and real life from ‘settings’.

While technology can assist the artist or dramatist to explore new horizons, to reflect new concepts and hitherto undiscovered depths of molecular realities, it

can also distance, obfuscate and make opaque the actual social experiences that

dramatists might be trying to unravel. That technology is able to blend art with function and machine to enhance the quality of life can be seen from the work of Walter Gropius and his Buhaus architects. One of the results of his design was that technology becomes a form of sense-experience and experience a form of technology which work synergetically to blur the distinction between art and life. As used by Western capitalists society, however, technology serves primarily to exploit and to re-produce the dominant relations of production. Theatre thus becomes an ideological tool in the hands of capital. It educates an audience of passive consumers, spoon-fed with ‘entertainment’ which mediates social roles and delimits clan experience. The machine and technology, implemented by the working class, are thus used against them to persuade an audience drawn from the dominant classes that their very dominance is a God given task that is natural, inevitable and desirable. One has only to look at the State Theatre in Pretoria and the Nico Malan Theatre in Cape Town to see these relations in operation. Initially opened to whites only, they are crammed with sophisticated technology which demands a content derived from the capitalist relations of production. Technology then, in capitalist society, far from extending the range of signs available to the artist, restricts them in term of the inherent ideological implications

of the technological process. Technology thus functions to break down the unconscious, reorganize it and recombine it in ideological forms that structure the external world. As humanity and, by implication theatre, become more technomorphic, performance outside of a building specifically designed for the purpose is either ignored or prepackaged as ‘street’ or ‘guerilla’ theatre. Whereas the theatre building functions to separate the audience from the players and entrench the distinction between art and life, these latter styles of theatre are an attempt to overcome this distinction, to draw attention to specific problems in society and to concientise the public to alternative everyday forms of theatre. Such theatre, however, remains a novelty unless it is a spontaneous expression of discontent such as the war dance enacted by the striking workers in front of Department of Labour officials at an iron foundary which later coalesced into the play, Ilanga

The very strengths of dramatic art are sublimated by technology which constrains ‘art’ to reflection only. The essence of theatre, however, is that it not only reflects reality but is able to mediate reality, to cause a change in the quality of life and to interact with society at large. The nature of this mediation will become clearer in the discussion to follow on actor and audience participation in Ilanga.

Authentic black theatre stands almost alone in its consistent achievement as a medium of working class expression. It has largelly been able to resist the bland homogenizing influences of capital, but often what starts out a working class theatre, is coopted by capital into an alliance, albeit an uneasy one, where content might reflect decontextualised aspects of conditions of existence without alluding to the cause of those conditions (eg Gibsen Kente’s Mama and the Load). The cogency of art, therefore, may be determined by the degree to which it exposes actual conditions of existence, their origins, how they are conformed ideologically and What their social effects are. Working class theatre in South Africa is thriving and is, moreover, nourished by the very social formation and ideology which suppresses so brutally the majority of people who live and work in the country. Generally found countries with long standing social problems where there are harsh, class conflicts, this type of theatre thrives under political despotism. The content of such theatre is endemic to the specific social formation: it is there waiting to be discovered, given form and communicated to a participant audience who are themselves part of that content. This interaction with actors is a cathartic experience which works to mitigate their lot in a performance which sees no separation or distinction between actor and viewer, stage and life or performance and reality: they are all part of the whole (through metonymy), playing interchangeable roles which inter-connects art with life. This relationship is succinctly stated by Shakespeare’s Jaques:

All the world’s a stage

And all the men and women merely players

They have their exists and entrances

And one man in his time plays many parts.

Computer technology, as it is employed in much theatre, particularly PACT for example, vitiates this relationship and has redefined it to, “ All the world’s a computerised stage”. This is the title of a conference to be held in August this year by the Institute of Theatre Technology at the (whites only) State Theatre in Pretoria.2 It is a prime example of where technology serves the interest of ideology and mediates a reality contingent upon the economic and political interests of state.

Third World theatre is a reaction against this technological fantisisation and seeks to rediscover history from the point of view of working class culture . Almost independently, it has traversed the path of early Greek theatre working as an information processing centre which spreads outwards from the group of per- formers into the wider community sensitizing workers to their lot and suggesting ways of improvement. This type of theatre, which I have elsewhere labelled committed theatre, seeks to make the viewer perceive, from the inside, the ideology whichhas brought about existing conditions of existence. Ilanga maybe conceptualised as committed worker theatre. This play arose out of the frustrations of a trade union lawyer (Halton Cheadle) who devised a role playing exercise to facilitate successful communication with fifty-five black iron foundry workers who had been arrested and assaulted by the police for allegedly striking illegally. During the pre-trial period it became clear to the lawyer that his clients no understanding of courtroom procedure, the desirability of corroborative evidence, accurate

statements and the importance of witnesses. Halton Cheadle outlines how the

play arose out of the capital-labour conflict so characteristic of worker Theatre in South Africa.

In preparing their defence, the meetings (between the Metal and Allied WorkersUnion shopstewards and management) and the strike were reconstructed in order to get proper statements from the accused strikers. During this reconstruction, the workers did not merely restate what was said, but started assuming roles . The idea of the play arose out of this. The Junction Avenue Theatre Group assisted in setting up a theatre workshop with some of the strikers. The play grew from the workshop. The plot closely followed the events of the foundry -the workers-actors strongly resisted any alteration of reality.

The plot of Ilanga has been described in a previous issue 3 so 1 will confine myself to a discussion of the play’s genesis and how its structure has been altered to suit different audiences to whom it has played.

In Ilanga we me dealing with the concept of theatre in its widest sense. This

Idea assumes that most of human social activity can be regarded as types of per-

formance and that such performance does not need to be located on a stage to be

termed theatre. Since reality is experienced through the mediating structures of language, it may be defined as a complex system of signs through which the real is made. The individual’s perception of the meanings of these signs is ideologically determined. All actions, whether on a stage or anywhere else, are encoded withsigns, and this definition of performance goes beyond metaphor, where the world is like a stage or stands for a stage, but instead uses the metonymic device of stating that the world is a stage. This allows us to considerably expand the notion ‘theatre’ to include the expression of everyday events such as the actions of iron foundry workers, miners (eg Egoli-City of Gold) or prison farm labourers (Imbumba)

The play, Ilanga, was derived from the initial role playing exercises which the basis of the courtroom in the defence of the alleged strikers. Ilanga went through a four-stage transformation in its development from strike to theatre. All of these stages, however, were types of performance and are contributors to the structure of the play. The four stages were:

1. The initial trade union activity which took the form of meetings with mana- gement over a period of time. The last of these meetings was interpreted as a strike by management. By calling the police, this led to the second stage.

2. The trade union lawyer was called in to defend the accused and obtained information about the event through a re-enactment by the workers who had been arrested.

3. Communication of events leading to the meetings or strike was performed in court, the actors (iron foundry workers) and director (lawyer) articulated their positions and contradictions to the audience (the magistrate). At this level, performance is a mediation rather than a reflection, for the outcome of the judgement has obvious implications for the lives of the individual defendants.

4. Once the idea arose to perform the incidents outlined in court in front of a worker audience in a union hall, the performance becomes a play. This brings the transformation to the final stage: The enactment of aspects of the previous events in a union hall. It now becomes theatre. The common denominator through all these stages then, is the notion of performance.

In Ilanga, the performer are the same people who were arrested, tried and convicted. The original audience were drawn from workers on the East Rand who had all experienced similar industrial conflicts and who comprised the same class. Under these conditions the performers are both actors and actants, dramatists and characters; their roles are interchangeable: the character play themselves and enact their lives before a participant audience which is drawn into the structure of the play. They are consulted about strike issues, they are sworn at, they denounce the black Department of Labour character as a sellout etc. This metonymic relation between the performer and the audience is further facilitated by the architecture of a union hall which is not deliberately designed to separate the actors from the audience. Cheadle explains the case with Ilanga:

Part of the problem with a stage is that you don’t get a sense of the activity or ambience of a working environment. We wanted to make the audience a apart of the performance. Originally , we had the petty bourgeois SEIFSA recruiter sellout come on and face the actor-worker. We changed that. Now he addresses the whole audience and the worker, who were on the stage, “go and sit in the front row.” The crucial thing was to get the audience to participate in rejecting this character. Two of the performers never go on stage but sit in different places in the audience and would heckle and shout. They would be seen as part of the audience. Well, the response was absolutely spontaneous. We didn’t even need those actors to sit in the audience because the whole audience just booed the petty bourgeois sellout as soon as he appeared. He tries to speak to the audience, saying “My black brothers I come from SEIFSA, an employer organization, my name is Msibi…” Then one of the audience actors says, “Can I ask you are question Mr. ‘Thebehali’?” Msibi retorts, “My name’s not Thebehali, it’s Msibi.” By this time the audience is thoroughly involved, and they all shout out their sellout’s names which cause endless hilarity. And then we began to find out all the in-jokes amongst the workers and the union committee. And the petty bourgeois SEIFA representative keeps denying that these are his names: “I’m one of you,” he pleads.

Other incidents which are acted out in the play are all drawn from workers experiences which have occurred in the foundry. Without this participant audience the play loses its essence and vigour. During the actor-audience debate of whether to strike or not the argument may go on for up to half an hour. There are a number of monologues by different workers who would describe life in the foundry and the misery of hostel accommodation. The first character is fatalistic, the second is a ‘joller’ who ‘ducks and dives’, and the third is a union representative who complains “You have given up and you are just ducking and diving. The real answer to our problem is a collective struggle”. Cheadle thus describes Ilanga as “a totally didactic and propagandistic play”.

While the play is performed for a participant audience drawn from the same social class as the actors it functions metonymically, connecting actors and audience to each other thereby integrating them with the everyday experiences of life itself. Once the play is moved from this organic environment and transplanted into a more conventional theatre such as The Box on the Wits University Campus, architecture, technology and functional divisions suppress the spontaneous metonymic components which are replaced with a more controlled metaphorical mediation of the play. The audience remains the audience, the actors are only actors and the content is interpreted as something separate from everyday life. This discontiguity is further strengthened by the fact that the original participant-actors, having lost their jobs, were endorsed out of the area, since they were not allowed to remain there for more than 72 hours after dismissal. Some continued in the play, their incomes being supplied by an entrance charge, while vacant roles were filled by members of the Junction Avenue Theatre Group. Once this process began, the original intention of the play was diluted and a degree of institutionalization began to be introduced.

The composition of the audience also contributes to this art-life dislocation for there is now a class conflict as it is unlikely that the petty bourgeois (mainly white) elements of South African society who would see the play in this environment would relate to calls for strike action. They certainly would not participate as the black working class audience did for they have nothing to relate to. Most, if not all of what they play dealt with would be outside their social experience. Thus, when the play was staged on the Wits campus, it had to be considerably restructured to meet the convections expected by the now predominantly white audience. As Cheadle remarks, white audience would probably be opposed to striking and rarely think of such action, whereas black workers consistently discuss whether, where and when they might strike. In order to resolve these issues where a white audience was present, one of the actors in the audience would say that it is better to go back to work and threaten to go on strike in a week’s time unless…In the conventional theatre the play is uncomfortable and uneasy. The lack of a participant audience, the loss of metonymy and the fact that much of the play is in Zulu reduces its subtlety and techniques which worked in a union hall become crudely propagandistic and amateurish. The monologues where the three workers address the audience look contrived where they were previously spontaneous; where the audience in the union hall joined the actors on stage in discussion and argument during tea time (interval) now the play runs continuously without a break for the petty bourgeois audience wouldn’t know what to talk about and would more likely escape into the fresh air outside for a coke and a smoke. These observations, of course, raise the question of whether or not this kind of theatre should be staged for the benefit of whites at all. The dramatic changes which are required to make the play sensible to such an audience definitely vitiates the structure of the play and affects performances.

Ilanga

has done its job. It has run its course and finished its cycle. To try to ressurect it under alien circumstances will ultimately destroy it and force it into the very world of theatrical convention and commodity exchange it is seeking to overcome. Yet elsewhere other plots are bubbling as workers theatre rides the sea of labour discontent. Certain incidents stand out, for example, the issue of pension funds provides one possible ‘story line’. Cheadle elaborates:

Black workers are being coopted into the total strategy through management who are trying to compel workers to belong to pension funds. This raises the issues of where pension funds invest their capital. They invest it in government stocks. The irony of it all is that workers are providing a form of capital accumulation at the expense of their exploitation.

The issues are multiple. The theatrical challenge is whether the candle of liberation can overcome the slavery of apartheid based capitalist technology. The final question: will workers theatre be able to supercede the anaethitizing effects of the State Theatre technocracy and hasten its disintegration, as this symbol of white supremacy falls prey to the destructive energy of its own lasers and remote controlled computers?

References

1. ‘foreign’ in the reciprocal sense that Tswanas are ‘foreign’ in South Africa.

2. The Star

(Tonight) 25. 6. 1981 aptly reports: “The use of the new State Theatre is appropriate as its architectural design and modern equipment lend themselves to the symposium theme”

3. See Molepo, M. M. 1981 for a review of the play. South African Labour Bulletin, Vo. 6, No. 6., pp.49-51

Refereed Journals

(With A Shepperson) “Re-Semiotizing the South African Democratic Project: The African Renaissance “, Social Semiotics, 11(1), 91-106

(With J Muller): “Class, Race and Oppression: Metaphor and Metonymy in ‘Black’ South African Theatre”, Critical Arts, 4(3) 1987, 40-59

“Theatre, Repression and the Working Class in South Africa”, Kunapipi, 4, 1982, 139-145

“Black South African Theatre: Text and Context”, English in Africa, 8(1) 1981, 51-58

“The Semiotics of Alternative Theatre in South Africa”, Critical Arts, 2(1) 1981, 14-33. Reprinted in Theaterwork, August 1983 (St Peter, Minnesota).

“From the Laser to the Candle – Ilanga Le So Phonela Abasebenzi: An Example of the Devolution of Theatre”, South African Labour Bulletin, Vol 6(8) 1981, 64-70

Reviews

“The Last Man“, Scenaria, No 18, 1980.

Author: Simoes, Anthea
Date: January 1999
Edited by Karin Barber. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1997. 184pp. Index. Illustrations
If one wishes to witness the thriving of African popular culture one needs to do no more than open one’s eyes and ears when travelling through any region on the continent. This became obvious to me when I was travelling from the beach front through town and then out onto the freeway in Durban, South Africa. On the columns of bridges, along concrete walls and in taxi ranks, there is an explosion of brightly coloured African paintings and mosaics which are difficult to miss. They give the impression of being the work of a teenage street artist who managed to trade in his spray cans for professional paint, but at the same time are professional and “deep” enough to be sold at a high price in an art gallery. The flaming pythons, African totem poles, Ndebele prints and blazing suns that appear in the depictions are good local examples of what Karin Barber refers to in the Introduction to Readings in African Popular Culture as the “undefined space” (1) of African arts where works do not easily fit the binary paradigm of `traditional’ and `elite’ or `modern’. It is such works which form the subjects for the readings in this varied book on African popular culture. The readings are reprints from a variety of journals, including Africa, American Ethnologist, passages, Ethnomusicology, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of Modern African Studies, and Popular Music.

Barber draws her understanding of `popular’ from Pierre Bourdieu who refers to its ambiguity as a result of it being “inscribed with the history of political and cultural struggles” (3). Her general cultural studies perspective relocates the articles reproduced within this broad interdisciplinary framework, which includes an excellent discussion of high/low culture debates, as initiated within the Frankfurt School. In the current context, this paradigm recuperates the earlier studies reproduced here into the contemporary condition, including postmodern relationships whereby global, homogenising forces are combined with local, national ones (eg. Erlmann’s paper on Graceland etc.). Barber’s anthology is a valuable collection of readings as popular forms of expression (eg. women’s romance fiction) have been largely ignored by academia. Yet, it is these popular expressions which reveal the most about the actual lives, relationships and consciousnesses of peoples living on the African continent. As Barber tells us, “these texts and genres seem to be sites of emergent consciousness.” (6)

Variety is important, especially in the context of popular cultures throughout an entire continent which therefore emanates from a wide spectrum of subjectivities, societies and locations. There is however too large a difference in the intellectual level of certain articles. In O.B. Lawuyi’s “The World of the Yoruba Taxi Driver”, the argument is not always clearly evident. The statements,

And in so far as inequality seems to exist among the various social strata of modern and traditional structures, political consciousness has derived from oppression, control, exploitation and paternalism. The resultant contradictions became a key element in political activism (1997: 146).

This statement, for example, is left unexplained. Further, the analysis of the vehicle slogans, the objective of the paper, seems to be secondary to a rudimentary description of the lives of taxi drivers. In contrast is Erlmann’s detailed study, “Africa Civilised, Africa Uncivilised: Local Culture, World System and South African Music”, which is simultaneously theoretical, musically and historically very sophisticated.

Barber’s Introduction points out that when Western paradigms, for example, those involving the `high’ and `low’ culture distinctions, are ” transplanted to Africa… [they] turn around on their axes and reconfigure themselves into an unstable, almost unusable paradigm” (4). This warning is timeous in alerting readers to the changing perspectives of history, paradigm and interpretation.

Perspective is also an issue when examining any of the translations from oral literature, reproduced in some chapters. It should be borne in mind that translations are interpretations which depend to a large extent on the personal experiences, world views and understandings of the translator. The translations of the Lesotho migrants’ songs in David Coplan’s article is a good example because these songs are similar to poetry in terms of some of the complex imagery and symbolism and, might therefore be subject to multiple interpretations.

There are valuable examples in African Popular Culture of how African traditions have been reworked and adapted in the context of a changing modern economic and social climate. In “Lesotho Migrants’ Songs” for example, Coplan analyses how workers have dealt with the discrepancy between traditional home life and modern urban working life. “Lifela songs provide a powerful vehicle both for changing self-identity on the mines and for reconstructing an identity continuous with life in Lesotho upon their return.” (32)

The readings give validity to genres which have in the past been relegated to a dark corner in academia. Jane Bryce’ s “Women and Modern African Popular Culture”, for example, affirms that `deviant’ texts such as romantic fiction, “[answer] not to western or westernized expectations, but to the aspirations/ pleasure/desire of a specifically local readership” (122). She concludes as does Barber that these writings should be regarded as “syncretic forms with `underlying cultural dispositions'” (123).

One aspect of the context of African popular culture which is not dealt with specifically in the book, probably because it is largely focused on the verbal rather than the visual, is that of the commercialisation of art in the context of late capitalism. Kwame Anthony Appiah in In My Father’s House, for example, states that “questions of what we call `aesthetic’ value are crucially bound up with market value”; and later, “African art is a commodity” (138). Unfortunately almost everything has been assigned a monetary value rather than an artistic one and this commercialisation will increasingly monopolise the world of culture. At the moment, however, this is not universally the case. Recently, while visiting the Kwa-Zulu Cultural Museum in Ulundi, Kwa-Zulu Natal, I stopped to look at a display of drawings of trees by a local artist. The display was accompanied by a personal note by the artist on himself and his work. The note concluded with mention of the fact that the artist’s friends had pointed out the possibility of him making some good money out of his drawings. (In a postmodern context this is generally the only way of confirming the value of any piece of work). The artist retorted in his note that “one would never sell one’s own children so how could he possibly sell his drawings”. Earlier in his note he states that his art involves an interaction between himself and the trees which are the subjects of his art.

African Popular Culture is a collection of works which validates the existence of `unconventional’ art of different kinds which eschews conventional categorisation but which is indicative of the social, political and economic realities of everyday life in Africa.

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WORKS CITED

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

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Anthea Simoes was graduate assistant in the Graduate programme for Cultural and Media Studies University of Natal, Durban, 1999-2001.

Ph.D Dissertation

Explorations in Drama, Theatre and Education. University of Natal, 1986

Refereed Articles

`The Case for Drama and Theatre Studies’. Africa 2001. Vol 1 (2). 1992.

`Researching Drama and Theatre in Education in South Africa’, South African Theatre Journal, 9 (61 – 81) 1995.

(With du Toit, M K.) `The Evaluation of a Drama Approach to AIDS Education’,. Educational Psychology, Vol 13, No 2, 1993.

(With Mlungwana, J.) `A Drama Approach to AIDS Education in KwaNgwanase’, New-Look Matlhasedi, University of Bophuthatswana, 1993.

(With Baxter, V. and Erasmus, C.) `Curriculum Proposals for Drama and Theatre Studies in a Reconstructed System of Education: Key Sections’, SAADYT Journal Vol 14, No 1, 1993.

`A Drama Approach to AIDS Education: An Experiment in Action Research’, AIDS Bulletin: Medical Research Council, Vol 1. 1992.

`Perspectives on Transforming Education through Drama and Theatre: The Current Situation in Formal Education’, SAADYT Journal, Vol 10, No 2, pp 1-14, Johannesburg, 1991.

`Drama to the People: The Challenge of the 1990s’, Inaugural Lecture, University of Zululand, 1992.

`From Ritual to Rationality: A Semiotic Analysis of Schooling Rites’. South African Theatre Journal, 4 (1): 119-147. 1990.

`New Directions for Drama and Theatre Studies’ Convonews, Vol 3, July 1989.

`Some Thoughts on Drama, Theatre and the Curriculum’. South African Theatre Journal, 1 (1): 85-139. 1987.

`Life Skills’, DramAidE Monograph Series, 1996.

(With Jaffe, Alan, ‘DramAide – A Drama approach to HIV/AIDS education’. AIDS Bulletin, Medical Research Council, Vol 6, Nos 1 and 2 pp. 29-32, May/June 1997.

`The use of Traditional Forms in Community Education’ Africa Media Review, Vol 11 No 1, 1997.

Allen, Garth and Allen, Isobel ‘Ideology, Practice and Evaluation: Developing the Effectiveness of TIE’. Research in Drama Education, Vol 4, No 1, March 1999.

Researching the use of drama for AIDS and lifestyle education in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Focus: A Guide to AIDS research, The AIDS Health Project pp 88 – 93, 1998.

Parker, Warren and Durden, Emma. Communicating Beyond AIDS Awareness: A manual for South Africa, Funded by the National Department of Health, 1999.

(With Botha, Paul. `See You at 7′:A Facilitator’s Guide to a Video about Developing Gender Responsibility. Funded by Johns Hopkins University, 2001.

Chapters in Books

`Liberation Now – Education Later?: How Political Context Affects Curriculum Development’, A Theatre in Your Classroom: Relationships Between Drama and Education. Bernie Warren (ed), Captus University Publications, Ontario. 1991.

`Liberation Now – Education Later? How Political Context Affects Curriculum Development’, Creating a Theatre in Your Classroom. Bernie Warren (ed) Captus Press, Ontario. 1995.

(With Preston-Whyte, E.) `Participation and Action: reflections on a community-based AIDS intervention in South Africa’. Participatory Research in Health: Issues and Experiences. Korrie de Koning and Marion Martin (eds). Zed Books Ltd, London, 1996.

(With Jaffe, A.) ‘AIDS Education: Interventions in Multi-Cultural Societies. Forthcoming, Plenum Press, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

`Researching DramAidE: A Drama Approach to AIDS Education in South Africa’, Drama and Theatre in Education: Contemporary Research, John Somers (ed) Captus Press, Ontario. 1996

Editor

SAADYT Journal, Vol 10(1), 1989; 11(1) 1990; 12(1) 1991.

(With V Baxter, SAADYT Journal Vol 14(1), 1993.

`A Drama Approach to AIDS Education’, Reports on the use of a drama approach to AIDS education in KwaZulu Secondary Schools, KwaZulu Departments of Health and Education, 1993.

Is DramAidE Making a Difference? Evaluations of DramAidE’, Report for Department of Health, 1996.

Editorial Consultant

South African Theatre Journal, University of the Witwatersrand. 1992 –

Researching Drama and Theatre in Education

, University of Exeter. 1995 –

Conference Proceedings

`The Role of Drama in a Reconstructed System of Education’. Association of Drama Departments South Africa (ADDSA),National Conference, Durban, 1992.

Panel Discussion on Drama in Education’. South African South African Association of Drama and Youth Theatre (SAADYT): Annual National Conference, Cape Town, 1992.

`Drama and Theatre Studies in a Reconstructed System of Education’. South African Association of Drama andYouth Theatre (SAADYT): Annual National Conference, Durban, 1993.

‘Policy is not Enough: The Challenge of Research’. South African Association of Drama and Youth Theatre (SAADYT) and Young People’s Education Theatre Trust (YPET) Annual National Conference Johannesburg, 1995.

` Making Sense of Arts Education. Ilitha Conference, Grahamstown, 1995.

`Tas Theatre Company: A Community Experiment:Posing Questions or Re-inforcing an Ideology’. International Theatre Conference, Barcelona, 1985. This paper was published in ACTES, Vol 1, Institut del Teatre, Diptucio de Barcelon, 1986.

`Participatory Research in Action in AIDS Education: Effects on Children and the Wider Community of a School Drama Project’. Conference on Participatory Action Research, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, England, 1993.

Other Publications and Reports

Allen, Garth, Allen, Isobel, “`Forbidden Fire’: An

Evaluation”, Report for Plymouth Safer Cities Project, 1997.

`DramAidE 1994’, Report for KwaZulu-Natal Departments of Health and Education, 1995.

`ARTS 2000, Policy for the Development of Arts Education’, National Arts Coalition Report submitted to the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology advisory committee (ACTAG), 1994.

`A Drama Approach to Population and Family Life Development. A Report on a Project undertaken in the Ciskei’, Report for the Department of Health, Ciskei, 1993.

`A Drama Approach to AIDS Education: A Report on an AIDS and Lifestyle Education Package implemented in a rural school in KwaZulu, Report for the Department of Health and Population Development (Pretoria), 1992.

`University Drama and Theatre Studies’. A treatise on Drama and Theatre Studies in South African Universities, Association of Drama Departments Southern Africa, 1990.

`Some Aspects of the uses of Educational Drama in the United Kingdom and the United States’, British Council, 1990.

`The Problems and Potential of Educational Drama and Theatre: A Comparative Study’. Human Sciences Research Council, 1990.