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Dinosaurs Become Birds: Changing Cultural Values in Cape Town Theatre1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2017
Abstract
This article examines a significant change in the hierarchies of value in cultural production in urban Cape Town, where there has been a bifurcation of theatre in the urban centre and on the township periphery. Theatre at these two sites differs in aesthetic character, themes and infrastructural resources, which derive from a history of legislated racial separatism that is still evident today socially, culturally, educationally and in the development of the city itself. Here, I identify changes that have come about in recent years not so much because of the government's policy of redress, but because leading artists are using their pre-eminence and institutions to catalyse educational experiences, performance platforms and a positive marketing environment for theatre and artists from the townships. The Baxter Theatre and its Zabalaza Festival serve as a case study.
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- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2017
Footnotes
1
This article began as papers offered at IFTR conferences in 2014 and 2015, where I received helpful feedback. My fieldwork undertaken on township theatre in 2005–9 was made possible by funding from the University of Cape Town's Research Committee and Research Office. At the Baxter I have been greatly assisted by marketing and administration staff. At the Zabalaza mini-festival in Nyanga East, Ongezwa Mbele sat alongside me whispering translation of the Xhosa used by the performers and those running the festival throughout a long day. I acknowledge all these sources of assistance and support with gratitude.
References
NOTES
2 Cape Town's townships have been built or ‘sprung up’ since the 1940s on the Cape Flats, at first quite close to suburbia, but every new township is further from the centre than the last. Transport options to the city are few and always costly. See McDonald, David, World City Syndrome: Neoliberalism and Inequality in Cape Town (New York and London: Routledge, 2008).Google Scholar
3 I use the term ‘repertoire’ after Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the townships a performatic repertoire is transmitted, by means of practising, repeating, imitating, improvising and performing, from parents to children, storyteller to audience, and elders to youthful initiates. This shared repertoire is recruited when the youth make theatre and it is recognized and taken up by the audience as well.
4 Fiske, John, ‘Audiencing: Cultural Practice and Cultural Studies’, in Denzin, Norman K. and Lincoln, Yvonna S., eds., The Landscape of Qualitative Research: Theories and Issues (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), pp. 359–78.Google Scholar
5 Morris, Gay, ‘Own-Made in the (Post-)New South Africa: A Study of Theatre Originating from Selected Townships in the Vicinity of Cape Town’ (University of Cape Town Library, unpublished doctoral thesis, July 2010); and Morris, ‘Institutional Arrangements of Theatre in the Cape: The Case of Township Theatre’, South African Theatre Journal, 22 (2008), pp. 102–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 All Our Legacies, Our Common Future, White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage (Pretoria: Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, 4 June 1996).
7 Cape Town's townships have no playhouses whatsoever. Crime and civil unrest make nighttime activities in the township risky. Leading theatre-makers from the townships, who participated in a symposium on township theatre on 7 June 2008 at UCT, which I chaired, emphasized that they want not only commercially viable performance work that is only available in town, but also artistic acknowledgement beyond the ‘ghetto’, and so they have always striven to perform in the city.
8 Fleishman is professor of drama at UCT, and founded Magnet Theatre with Reznek in 1987. See Lewis, Megan and Krueger, Anton, eds., Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space (Bristol: Intellect, and Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2016)Google Scholar.
9 Theatre Arts Admin Collective provides an accessible and inexpensive performance space for the work of new artists, especially by means of their annual Emerging Theatre Director's Bursaries. See www.theatreartsadmincollective.weebly.com, accessed 4 May 2017.
10 Brett Bailey is a South African playwright, designer, director and installation maker, and the artistic director of the performance company Third World Bunfight. His works have toured internationally and he has worked in Europe and Africa. From 2008 until 2011 Bailey and Jay Pather curated Infecting the City: The Spier Public Arts Festival, which Pather continues to run. Pather is an associate professor at UCT, artistic director of Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre and director of GIPCA, which became the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) in 2016. A curator, choreographer and director, he collaborates with visual artists, architects and urban planners, taking his intercultural performances into public spaces in South Africa's cities as well as to London, Zanzibar, New York, Barcelona and Mumbai.
11 Hardie is a dynamic catalyst of theatre for young audiences. She initiated ASSITEJ, which has centres in eighty-two countries, in South Africa in 2007 and was elected president (2011–14). Cradle of Creativity, the nineteenth ASSITEJ World Congress and International Theatre Festival for Children and Young People, took place in Cape Town in May 2017.
12 Undoubtedly there have been significant pockets of activism from other individuals and institutions in the past decade – writer and director Mandla Mbothwe springs to mind – but those listed have been consistently and programmatically foregrounding the experience of township artists.
13 Barrow, Brian and Williams-Short, Yvonne, eds., Theatre Alive! The Baxter Story 1977–1987 (Rondebosch: The Baxter Theatre at the University of Cape Town, n.d.), pp. 10–33.Google Scholar
14 Sylvia Vollenhoven, ‘More Black Involvement’, in Barrow and Williams-Short, Theatre Alive!, pp. 95–6.
15 Steinberg, Carol and Purkey, Malcolm, ‘South African Theatre in Crisis’, Theatre Magazine, 25, 3 (1994), pp. 24–37 Google Scholar, here p. 32.
16 Krummeck, Peter, ‘A Passion for Theatre’, in de Hen, Vera, ed., Baxter 21: 21st Anniversary Collector's Edition (Cape Town: Primavera, n.d.), pp. 89–91 Google Scholar, here p. 90.
17 Bourdieu ‘expands Marx's idea of “economic capital” to encompass all forms of power that enable individuals, groups or classes to cement or reproduce their position in the social hierarchy’. Browitt, Jeff, ‘Pierre Bourdieu: Homo Sociologicus’, in Browitt, Jeff and Nelson, Brian, eds., Practising Theory: Pierre Bourdieu and the Field of Cultural Production (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 1–12 Google Scholar, here p. 4. Bourdieu also argues that symbolic capital is transformable into economic capital at some stage.
18 Nazli George, ‘Broadening the Theatre Audience Base’, in de Hen, Baxter 21, pp. 48–9.
19 Focus group interview with volunteer audience members after a performance during the Ikhwezi Festival on 21 March 2007.
20 See Morris, Gay, ‘Flexible Weaving: Investigating the Teaching and Learning Opportunities in the Practices of Theatre-Makers and Performers from Selected Townships in Cape Town, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 18, 1 (February 2013), pp. 4–24 Google Scholar. Morris, ‘Making Space for Community: Magnet Theatre “Intervenes” in Khayelitsha’, in Lewis and Krueger, Magnet Theatre, pp. 223–42.
21 Foot's most significant plays address South Africa's gravest social problems in extraordinarily creative ways. They include Tshepang (2003), Karoo Moose (2007), Solomon and Marion (2011), Fishers of Hope (Taweret) (2014) and The Inconvenience of Wings (2016), all of which have been produced in South Africa and abroad, most having been published by Oberon, a respected publisher of plays in English.
22 Foot, Lara, ‘Director's Message’, in Baxter Theatre Centre Annual Review 2010 (Rondebosch: Baxter Theatre Centre at the University of Cape Town, n.d.), pp. 8–9 Google Scholar, here p. 8.
23 ‘ Income Statement’ in Baxter Theatre Centre Annual Review 2014 (Rondebosch: Baxter Theatre Centre at the University of Cape Town, n.d.), p. 34 Google Scholar. In the same review, in her CEO/director's report, Foot writes, ‘Our main challenge remains that we receive no funding from institutions such as the Department of Arts and Culture, the National Lotteries Distribution Trust Fund and the National Arts Council. And yet our accomplishments and artistic successes are primarily in the area of development and creating new South African work of an internationally acclaimed standard’. Ibid., p. 7.
24 Artscape: an Agency of the Department of Arts and Culture, ‘2014–2015 Annual Report’, at www.artscape.co.za/assets/downloads/ARTSCAPE_ANNUAL_REPORT_2015.pdf, accessed 22 May 2017.
25 Baxter Productions which have toured overseas include Foot's Karoo Moose (2007, 2009, 2016), Solomon and Marion (2011, 2013, 2014) and Mies Julie, adapted from Strindberg's Miss Julie, adapted and directed by Yael Farber (2012–17)
26 See the Baxter Theatre Centre Annual Reviews, 2010–14.
27 In distinctive ways Bongile Mantsai and Zoleka Helesi are as accomplished as Mbongo. As an actor, musician and choreographer, Mantsai has achieved local and international acclaim, particularly in Alistair Izobell's musical revue Vocal is Lekker at the Baxter in 2011, Karoo Moose and Farber's Mies Julie, which has been showered with accolades. He is a lead actor in the film Inxeba: The Wound, which premiered in 2017 at the Sundance Film Festival. But Mantsai's pastoral loyalty to the youth of Cape Town is unstinting and as Zabalaza's executive director his organizational capacities are much in demand. Zoleka Helesi is the Zabalaza administrator and she networks with teachers to involve schools and communities, as audiences and performers, with theatre through Zabalaza, at the same time as she performs and directs. In 2016 she translated Janice Honeyman's ‘Bangalory's Back’ into Xhosa and staged it for junior primary audiences at Zabalaza. She has also recently toured abroad in Mies Julie and Karoo Moose.
28 Mbongo, participating in a focus group interview with volunteer audience members, after a performance of Beneath Silent Waters during the Ikhwezi Festival, 21 March 2007.
29 Author interview with Thami Mbongo when he was a freelance theatre-maker, shortly after the 2006 Ikhwezi Festival, 5 April, Cape Town.
30 Thami aka Mbongo, ‘Community Theatre Deserves Respect’, Artslink.co.za, 13 October 2009, at www.artlink.co.za/news_article.htm?contentID=8733, accessed 18 May 2017.
31 ‘New Zabalaza Theatre Festival’, Artslink.co.za, 6 March 2011, at www.artlink.co.za/news_article.htm?contentID=27279, accessed 18 May 2017.
32 See ‘Zabalaza Intsika eBaxter Theatre’, at www.facebook.com/ZabalazaFestival; ‘Theatre in the Communities Deserves Respect’, at www.facebook.com/groups/129668820420589; ‘Baxter Theatre at the University of Cape Town, the Zabalaza Festival’, at www.baxter.co.za/about/zabalaza; ‘Zabalaza Talent Search Season Is On’, News 24, 28 January 2016, at www.news24.com/southafrica/local/city-vision/zabalaza-talent-search-season-is-on-20160127; all sites accessed 18 May 2017.
33 Baxter Theatre Centre, at www.baxter.co.za/shows/3297, accessed 18 May 2017.
34 I surmise that Zabalaza organizers have adopted the term ‘observer’ to avoid the term ‘adjudicator’, which implies judging and is not required. Since only a small per diem is paid to observers, they tend to be theatre professionals and teachers with a particular interest in township or community theatre who are willing to offer their help for a weekend.
35 In 2015 mini-festivals were held in four largely black townships, one largely ‘coloured’ suburb and one country town. The geographical layouts of towns in South Africa bear the legacy of apartheid planning, so townships tend to be separated from the centres and are generally less well resourced and mainly populated by blacks from the Cape as well as African immigrants, and ‘coloureds’ – the South African term for Creoles.
36 All of these plays were chosen for the festival at the Baxter. The five groups come from the following townships (distance from the centre of Cape Town in brackets): Gugulethu (18 kilometres), Kraaifontein (40 kilometres), Samora Machel (26 kilometres), Mfuleni (40 kilometres) and Khayelitsha (30 kilometres). Egoli and Ndendile were on the main programme. Later in the year Egoli had a fortnight's run as a Baxter production; Ndendile was performed at the Cape Town Fringe Festival and at Makukhanye Art Room in Khayelitsha, and has been published by Junkets.
37 Author interview with Foot, 15 July 2014.
38 Junkets Publisher is an independent local press publishing for young readers. In association with the Baxter, they publish the winning play from each year's Zabalaza Festival. To date they have published Worst of Both Worlds by Bulelani Mabutyana, Skierlik by Phillip M Dikotla, The Champion by Khayalethu Anthony, Fruit by Paul Noko and TIPex by Lauren Hannie. See http://junketspublisher.blogspot.co.za, accessed 10 May 2016.
39 Lara Foot, ‘Director's Message’, Annual Review 2011, pp. 6–7, here p. 6.
40 Homann, Greg, ‘Introduction’, in Homann, G., ed., At This Stage: Plays from Post-apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009), pp. 17–29 Google Scholar, here p. 18.
41 See Clare Stopford, ‘Case Study: Reach’ in Stopford's dissertation, ‘Mise en Scène as a Feminine Textual Body: Making Meaning in New Plays’ (University of Cape Town Library: unpublished MA dissertation, 2013), pp. 75–105, here pp. 99–101. Stopford is a long-time associate of Foot's, and directed the premiere of Reach in 2007.
42 On Sunday 20 March 2016 I was present at the Fleur du Cap theatre awards ceremony and heard Mbongo make his speech, which he posted on Facebook the following day. See www.facebook.com/akambongo, accessed 1 April 2016.