Location: Zoom Room 1
Zoom Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/3874647177?pwd=Jw1g9axPFpvKa8qEe26DCLjGd0ACbW.1
Moderator: Malika Daya
Abstracts:
Marcia Blumberg, “Theatrical Revisioning as Inheritance in Post-apartheid South African Theatre”
Adrienne Rich defines revisioning as, “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering a text from a new critical direction”. Valuing plays from ancient Greece to modern drama, the revisionings resituate these texts in new historical and socio-political contexts in post-apartheid South Africa. In the past few decades these innovative reworkings have offered creative diversity that challenged apartheid norms, exposed national trauma, and refused percepticide, (Diana Taylor’s term for “deliberate blindness”).
My paper focuses on Woyzeck on the Highveld, a collaboration between Handspring Puppets and William Kentridge. In 1837, Georg Buchner wrote Woyzeck and died, leaving an unfinished play. Buchner is considered one of the fathers of modern drama and his play is categorized as the 1st tragedy of the common man. In Woyzeck on the Highveld (1992) the Buchner inheritance informs the plot but resituates theatrical and political parameters in South Africa. The protagonist, a black migrant worker, exists in an untenable situation arising from poverty as he struggles to support Maria and their baby. He augments work for the captain by participating in the doctor’s experiments that drive him insane. Using Bunraku and shadow puppets to show race and class difference, the multi-leveled set and Kentridge’s charcoal stop-frame projections form complex backdrops. The gloomy black/grey color palette encapsulates the oppressive zeitgeist, the murder of Maria, and suicide of Woyzeck. What theatrical inheritance will revisionings presage for future post-apartheid theatre productions? Will audiences see with “fresh eyes”?
Mutombo Kabantu, “La remise en question de la coopération Nord-Sud dans La villa belge de José Tshisungu wa Tshisungu. Poétique et politique des clivages”
Depuis la mise au Point de Pierre Larthomas, l’ on sait plus où moins avec précision ce qui est propre au théâtre et qui fonde le langage dramatique ; sachant que le texte théâtral porte en lui-même le germe de la représentation scénique. Comment José Tshisungu wa Tshisungu dénonce -t-il les outrecuidances politiciennes dans son œuvre dramatique ? La villa belge releve d’une catégorie poétique particulière transcendant la littérature : le théâtre, comme l’indique l’ élément générique des Indices paratextuels de ce livre.Quels sont les procédés théâtraux que notre dramaturge convoque pour mettre en exergue le fossé qui sépare les gouvernants des gouvernants africains? La coopération Nord-Sud est remise en question par José Tshisungu wa Tshisungu a travers les diatribes indirectes entre le professeur -entremetteur et le coopérant européen. Le dialogue Nord-Sud est entaché des ruptures, des malentendus et de réconciliation à l’ image des relations conjugales cahoteuses du couple du député national. Ainsi s’agira-t-il d’ analyser la connotation du titre, d’ esquisser la fable de la pièce, d’ analyser le fonctionnement des différents espaces en opposition pertinente, la nature et le croisement du dialogue faisant ressortir ainsi les différents clivages politiques, sociaux et culturels qui tissent la trame de La villa belge.
Alessandro Simari, “The Spectre of Theatre Work”
In Vincent Leblanc-Beaudoin and Daniel Bartolini’s site-specific performance Le Concierge, performed at Saint-Frère-André Secondary School in Toronto for SummerWorks 2025, audience members are recruited to follow a caretaker around as they perform their quotidian workplace rituals. The school is closed for the evening; as such, the caretaker cleans dirty floors and reorganize displaced furniture, takes their dinner break, and finds opportunities to slack off from their monotonous circuit of work. The school children for whom le concierge labours are encountered as a spectral presence during performance: they are principally known through the remains of their daytime learning activities littered carelessly throughout vacated school spaces—that is, until the caretaker reckons with the apparition of a student who haunts and tortures him with his own cleaning supplies.
This paper takes up Le Concierge as a case study for theorising the face-to-face encounter of performance, whether that encounter be imagined as a living co-habitation or a spectral absence. Performance, I will suggest, reveals how spaces of capitalist activity need not invite ghosts to interface with the dead; capitalist-space and capitaslist-time is always already haunted by the spectre of commodity-mediated social relations in which we encounter actors as dead labour who chasten us for our “wasted” and unproductive leisure-time.
Alisa Zhiliaeva, “Standing on the Doorstep, or Going Places. How Scenography Addresses Places of Transition”
On 27 December 2006, the troupe of Théâtre du Soleil, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine in collaboration with Hélène Cixous, created the play Les Éphémères. It balanced between two temporal narratives, in which the stories told in the present evoked memories of the past. The coherence of the disrupted narrative was made possible by the scenography: each scene was presented on several round wheeled platforms—one large, where the main events took place, and one or two smaller ones, where a door or another entry point in the story was situated. The doors placed on the platforms addressed the places of transition, marking the entrance points in the narrative. They also functioned as a “screen” structure, marking the distance between the story presented on stage and the spectator, both inviting and yet preventing the spectator from entering.
In the installation Doors, 2022, Swiss artist Christian Marclay brings together multiple cuts of scenes from the films linked by the doorways, the common theme creating a continuance in the disrupted narrative. The door transforms into a physical obstacle, and yet a necessary condition for seeing Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage, 1946-1966, by Marcel Duchamp at the Philadelphia Art Museum. In the paper we suggest to examine these examples in order to situate scenography as a practice in transition, balancing between theater and contemporary art, able to propose places suspended in time and space, “queering” the spectator’s orientation within it.
Biographies:
Dr Marcia Blumberg is an Associate Professor in English, York University, Toronto. She specializes in Contemporary Drama, political theatre from South Africa, and international re-visionings.. She co-edited a book on South African theatre with Dr Dennis Walder and has published widely and presented papers at many conferences internationally.
Mutombo Kabantu: Directeur artistique du groupe théâtral Cherad(DRCongo). Ancien lecturer à l’université de l’Afrique du Sud (Unisa) et initiateur du colloque international :la littérature congolaise : bilan et perspectives d: avenir ( Unisa). Actuellement, enseignant de la littérature africaine à l: École supérieure du savoir plus, Lubumbashi (DRCongo).
Dr Alessandro Simari is a theatre scholar and artist who focuses on the cultural politics and political economy of theatre. Current projects include a collaborative monograph on Commercial Performance and a monograph about the history of theatre ushers. He was the recipient of CATR’s 2024 Robert G. Lawrence Prize. He is a member of the Performance & Political Economy Research Collective. He teaches theatre studies at University of Windsor and English at University of Ottawa.
Alisa Zhiliaeva is a PhD student at the Universities of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She is affiliated with the Departments of Philosophy and Theater Studies and works under the supervision of Bruno Haas and Johanna Zorn. Her current research interests lie in the definition of the contemporary “iconic situation” (a term coined by Bruno Haas) specific to both theater and contemporary art.