Location: Zoom Room A
Moderator: Natalie Rewa
The Island: Performing The Trial of Antigone at a Robben Island Prison Concert
Robben Island constitutes a circular shoreline in the Atlantic10 km from Cape Town. After various uses, it housed 1961–1991, a maximum-security prison for male political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela. No one ever escaped from Robben Island since heavy currents impeded attempts to swim to the mainland. These natural currents are metaphorized in the play, The Island, created in 1973 by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. Oppressive, constraining regulations of invisible vicious warders inflict futile tasks and humiliation on two lawbreakers, John and Winston. The opening consists of 10 minutes of interminable mimed digging of sand into an unseen wheelbarrow and then dumping it onto the bare stage.
The inmates share a cell, recount stories, and enact metatheatrical games to survive the blurring of boundaries through loss of identity, isolation from family, and confinement from the world. The play ends with their performance of The Trial of Antigone at the prison concert. John represents Creon, and Winston acts as Antigone, a difficult role for a black man impersonating a young white princess, who has become a paradigm for civil disobedience over the millennia. At the climax, Winston removes his simple costuming to challenge unjust prison restrictions with dangerous defiance to utter Antigone’s Sophoclean speech as she is led to her death for burying her brother: “I honoured those things to which honour belongs.”
Una Chaudhuri believes that “Who one is and who one can be . . . are a function of WHERE one is and HOW one experiences that place.” Her citation is apposite for this hybrid theatre that fuses African traditions and South African dialect with Western forms like ‘poor’ theatre and absurdism. My paper explores how the play deconstructs boundaries in theatre, in political and philosophical issues, and positions spectators on this theatrical shoreline as complicitous with the prison warders.
Marcia Blumberg, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of English, York University
Fishing Method as a Framework of Community-Based-Performance Creation: Applied Theatre in the Aftermath of Climate Disaster
In this paper, I will foreground local elders’ epistemology in practicing traditional fishing methods in an island community in Tubabao Island, Eastern Samar, Philippines, while using it as a performance approach in scaffolding a process of creating a community-based performance. Using autoethnographic narrative exposition, I argue that community-based theatre performances informed by local creativity can mobilize world-making in the aftermath of a disaster. Within the complexity of local to international post-disaster reconstruction and recovery programming, after Super Typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan) struck Tubabao Island, I formulated an applied theatre performance method that draws on the epistemological orientation on people’s oceanic creativity. Through this gesture, I argue that an effective and agentic mode of performance creation recenters people’s imagination that underscores Indigenous ways of knowing. I build this argument by asking: To what extent does applied theatre become a living archive of post-disaster mitigation and acts of recovery from memories and traumas of devastation? Lastly, I aim to offer an ethical inquiry and practice of applied theatre that tackles climate crises in sites with a long history of disaster that highlights the agency of community members and the persistence of Indigenous knowledge, social relationality, and local creativity amidst climate change.
Dennis D. Gupa, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre and Film, University of Winnipeg
Bio: He has an MA in Theatre Arts degree (University of the Philippines), an MFA in Theatre (University of British Columbia), and a PhD in Applied Theatre (University of Victoria). As a former Vanier scholar, Dr. Gupa wrote his dissertation on sea rituals, climate change, and Indigenous ecological knowledge in island communities in the Philippines impacted by climate crises.