Moyo, Arifani. 'Indigeneity and Theatre in the New South Africa.'
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Indigeneity and Theatre in the New South Africa Arifani James Moyo Royal Holloway, University of London PhD in Theatre Studies 2015 Declaration of Authorship I, Arifani James Moyo, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 30 June 2015 2 Acknowledgements The writing, research and all sponsorship for this PhD thesis were part of the international, multidisciplinary humanities research project, Indigeneity in the Contemporary World: Politics, Performance, Belonging (2009 – 2014), a project that Professor Helen Gilbert initiated and led with funding from the European Research Council. The project headquarters was the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research (CITPR) at the Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway University of London. The project looked at ―how indigeneity is expressed and understood in our complex, globalising world‖, and the diverse ways in which indigeneity‘s ―cultural, political, ethical and aesthetic issues are negotiated‖ through ―performance as a vital mode of cultural representation and a dynamic social practice‖ (www.indigeneity.net). The core research team included anthropologists and arts scholars with experience in indigenous peoples‘ movements of the Americas, Australia and the Pacific Islands. The project widely networked, and also hosted numerous fellowships, with indigenous scholars, artists and activists from around the globe. My task was to explore the topic of ‗Indigeneity in the New South Africa‘. I thank Professor Gilbert for this extraordinary experience, and for supervising the PhD. I also thank Professor Matthew Cohen, Doctor Lynette Goddard and Professor David Wiles for their generous support of the supervision. I am grateful to my ever supportive colleagues, friends and family whom I cannot adequately acknowledge here, as well as my indigenous educators, whom I cannot properly credit for so much inspiration. Thank you, reader, for your time. I remember meeting Robert Owens Greygrass, a Lakota storyteller, a remarkable man. 3 Abstract In recent decades, the emergence of a global indigenous peoples‘ movement has renewed the significance of indigeneity as a theme of pan-Africanist ethnology. This thesis looks at the semiotics of indigeneity in post-apartheid South African intercultural theatre, focusing on four high-profile works of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The study of theatrical examples helps to ascertain what ‗indigeneity‘ means for creativity and subjectivity, thus sensitising both the empiricism and the critique of ethnology. The method of study combines comparative and dramaturgical approaches, focusing substantially on subtext in order to philosophically develop theatre‘s poetics of indigeneity for both dialectical and didactic engagement. I argue that South African indigeneity is most palpable through the metaphysics of filiation, which theatre narrates through the themes of nativity, orphanhood and adoption as progeny desire intimacy with progenitors, closeness to origins and belonging in milieus. The examples include Richard Loring‘s dance-musical-percussion pageant, African Footprint (2000), Magnet Theatre‘s avant-garde dance-drama, Rain in a Dead Man’s Footprints (2004), Isango Ensemble‘s post-classicist opera-film, uCarmen eKhayelitsha (2005), and Yael Farber‘s post-naturalist drama, Mies Julie (2012). These aesthetically and ideologically diverse works show that the poetics of filiation is very malleable to different ends; thus it beckons a fresh humanistic turn in the pan-Africanist critique of cultural performance. Such a turn could treat creative outputs as works of ontology, while subjectivity is centrally the articulation of crucial affinities through which peoples formulate identities. 4 Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 6 Theatre, Philosophy and the Return of Indigeneity in Pan-Africanist Thought Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................................. 28 ‘Indigeneity’ as Metaphysics of Filiation in Twenty-First Century South Africa Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................................. 84 Nativity, Orphanhood and Adoption in Richard Loring’s African Footprint (2000) Chapter 3 ............................................................................................................................... 136 Colonial Orphanhood in Magnet Theatre’s Rain in a Dead Man’s Footprints (2004) Chapter 4 ............................................................................................................................... 191 Postcolonial Faces of the Orphan in Isango Ensemble’s uCarmen eKhayelitsha (2005) Chapter 5 ............................................................................................................................... 241 Contesting Inheritance through Contesting Filiations in Yael Farber’s Mies Julie (2012) Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 299 Filiation as Key Concept for Understanding South African Subjectivities of Indigeneity Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 317 5 Introduction Theatre, Philosophy and the Return of Indigeneity in Pan-Africanist Thought During the twentieth century, a global indigenous peoples‘ movement, representing more than three hundred and seventy million people (UNPFII), and following historical decolonisation and civil rights movements, gained pace and became highly visible in cultural and political forums. This movement is extremely multifarious, and has taken advantage of the considerable technological and cultural developments of the information age, enabling a vast interconnectivity of representatives of indigenous people groups and various institutions participating in the movement around the world (Levi and Maybury-Lewis 12). It is a political, humanitarian and cultural arena, wherein diverse ideologies, agendas and exigencies meet under banners such as human rights, peoples‘ rights and cultural regeneration. Decades of global institutional campaigns finally resulted in one of the movement‘s most important achievements, the historic 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN). Many parts of the contemporary movement resemble the world‘s diverse, preceding decolonisation struggles, including the twentieth-century pan- African expulsion of European colonialisms. Pan-African humanitarianism has participated in the new international advocacy of indigenous peoples‘ postcolonial rights and restitution; thus the very question of ‗indigeneity‘ makes its ‗return‘, that is, back into the program of pan-Africanist intellectual engagement with culture and identity. 6 This moment of ‗return‘ beckons a fresh philosophical response; yet pan-Africanist intellectuals have generally not made much of the fact.1 Scholars have often been either too uncritical or too critical, neither case allowing enough breathing room for the emergence of an appropriate attuning to the new indigeneity as a unique challenge to cultural theory. The uncritical contingent tends to rehearse the racial essentialism and decolonisation stylistics of an older pan-Africanist consciousness, which either incorporates or rejects the new indigeneity. The overcritical scholars are so impatient and sceptical that the new voice of indigeneity, facing its own enemies, does not have a fair trial, even when the judge attempts neutrality, for this neutrality still cannot permit the thought that indigeneity might be a genuine voice of reason, not just a political actor seeking legitimisation from other authorities of reason. Indigeneity‘s new appearance, specifically as ‗return‘, generally finds no adequate acknowledgement among those who feel that they already know indigeneity very well as they applaud or dismiss it. There are exceptions, such as Adam Kuper‘s anthropologically critical essay, ―The Return of the Native‖, which scholars in social studies and anthropology usually regard as the most memorable polemical response against the indigenous peoples‘ movement. The essay did indeed note that a thematic ‗return‘ had transpired, but Kuper then reduced this ‗return‘ to simply a problematic new primitivism; thus the essay and similar critiques have not ultimately broken the general intellectual pattern, whereby the ‗return‘ is merely an ideological and pragmatic situation to support, resist or analyse noncommittally. This pattern has led to a philosophical gap, which is evident, not through particular theoretical discussions, but through the very dearth of the kind of exploratory thinking of 1 I have previously dealt with the problems of African philosophy in my short monograph, the arguments of which I will not repeat here, but even my own earlier work does not overcome the limitations that I am now describing. 7 which my thesis is an attempt. Such exploration takes the return of indigeneity as a special incitement not to ‗judge‘ indigeneity but rather to make its voice properly audible. Scholars are not wrong in associating newer concepts of indigeneity with older ones, and not allowing