AFRICAN WORKSHOP As part of the Theatre in the African Context module we had a practical workshop with Awe Moyo, who completed her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick and is now an IAS postdoctoral fellow. Studying African theatre has been like reinterpreting what we classify as ‘theatre’ in the Western world. Its focus on symbolism, community and spirituality strongly distances it from the theatrical conventions we are familiar with, and so it felt very necessary for us to get on our feet and begin to understand the essence of African theatre as performers as well as scholars. Based around the Tanzanian play ‘The Contest’ by Mukotani Rugyendo, where two tribesmen go head-to-head for a wife, we first worked with rhythm and improvisation to grasp how music and dance is integral to gatherings in East African communities. It became clear that different rhythms and percussion beats trigger connotations in our minds, and the ability for music to evoke responses and conjure up memories is an incredibly effective tool in communicating an idea with an audience. ‘The Contest’ uses tribes to represent Socialism and Capitalism on a universal scale, and so manifesting their ideologies physically, we would be closer to comprehending how they are reimagined in Rugyendo’s play. We used our bodies in repetitive movement to create machines representing Capitalist and Socialist perceptions of money and how it is produced, and furthered this sense of having a unified mindset with African song and dance in improvisation and ‘call and response’ structures. Community and belonging is at the heart of local tradition and it is important we understood the context of the people being depicted in ‘The Contest’. We concluded the workshop by improvising our own contest between Socialists and Capitalists – with two opposing groups. The result was a charged and passionate expression of ideas, and the fact that we could take our Western understanding of these political stances and communicate them in a conventional African form suggested that we grasped the core ideas of performance in this specific African context, which helped to bring clarity to our understanding of the texts we are studying. Sam Wightman, 2nd Year
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 01:26:30 +0000