Chapter 10 - Staging East Africa through Global Exchange

Summary

This chapter closely examines the Kampala International Theatre Festival, an annual event since 2014, as an example of a new generation of small international theatre festivals in twenty-first-century African urban centres. It asks how such festivals differ from their counterparts in other parts of the world and what they can do to shape and define contemporary local African theatre practices and their relationships to global stages. Drawing on participant observation, interviews with artists, and historical and political contextualization, it analyses this Uganda-based festival as a performative event that cultivates national and transnational affectively experienced communities, alternately along the lines of Ugandan, regional East African, and global alliances. It argues that the festival’s artistic and social activity, driven by strategic local administrators and artists, cultivates a next generation of Ugandan theatre artists and audiences, affirms regional connections that economic and political circumstances of post-colonial Africa have sometimes obscured, strengthens cultural and artistic flows that defy hegemonic trends of North–South collaboration, and asserts agency over Uganda’s ongoing process of cultural globalization.