What is a Classic? 3.0: Poetry, myth and classical forms in some contemporary South African theatre

This presentation is conceived as another in a series of lectures on the theme: “What is a classic?” by artist/theoreticians who were born outside of Europe but to some extent lay claim to a tradition of European classics in relation to their identity and their work. The first of these is T.S. Eliot who presented his lecture on the topic to the Virgil Society in London in October 1944. Eliot was of course an American who ‘became’ English and claimed an apparently European line of descent from Virgil, for himself and for his fellow Englishmen which, as JM Coetzee put it, “they have not always been eager to embrace”. The second is Coetzee himself who presented his lecture in the early 1990s at Michigan State University but was, at the time, living in South Africa where he was born (he now lives in Australia). And now, there is me in 2024, a theatre-maker who is also an academic, born in Africa, still living and working in South Africa, but perhaps only provisionally or partially African and indebted to a tradition of European classics that I do not necessarily or always want or own, but which difficult histories and complex presents make it impossible to disown entirely. 

My intention in this presentation is to examine the ways in which what might be called ‘classics’ are used or continue to be used by contemporary theatre-makers in the South African context, in the aftermath of formal colonialism and apartheid. I will do this through an examination of work produced as part of the Reimagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South (ReTAGS) project, a five-year research project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and based at the University of Cape Town.

The questions I hope to engage are:

• What is the status of the so-called European ‘classic’ in the colonial aftermath? And are there African ‘classics’ that either counter or are in conversation with, the European ‘classic’ in the aftermath? And if so, who might lay claim to these different kinds or classes of ‘classic’?

And then,

• How do these ‘classics’ function as formal devices in the dramaturgy of contemporary theatre?

Respondent: Neo Muyanga 

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Professor Mark Fleishman (Cape Town), ICS TBL Webster Fellow 2023/24
Writer, director and academic, Mark Fleishman is Professor at the Centre for Theatre Dance and Performance Studies (CTDPS) at the University of Cape Town and Co-Artistic Director of Magnet Theatre. He is an award-winning director and writer and an internationally respected theatre scholar. Since 2019 he has directed Reimagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South , a project that takes a concept – tragedy – from the very beginnings of theatre in its European manifestation and reimagines it from a perspective in Africa that is directed at the complex challenges of our global postcolonial present and towards our possible futures. The project aims to understand how tragedy has been refigured in the post-colonial theatre; how moments of tragic excess are enacted outside of the theatre in the course of revolts against neo-colonial establishments and forces; and, in an embodied, performative manner, how tragedy might be utilized as a tool for understanding the present regime of time and its performative effects in the global neo-colonial complex that characterizes the world as it is emerging now across all hemispheres.

Neo Muyanga is a composer, sound artist and librettist. His work traverses new opera, jazz improv and Zulu and Sesotho idiomatic song. He sang in township choirs before assimilating into the madrigal tradition while living in Italy in the 1990’s. In 1996 he co-founded (with Masauko Chipembere) the duo, Blk Sonshine, and in 2008, co-founded (with Ntone Edjabe) the Pan African Space Station - a platform for cutting-edge Pan African music and sound art on the internet. His records include: Blk Sonshine (1999), the Listening Room (2003), Fire, Famine Plague and Earthquake (2007), Good Life (2009), Dipalo (2011), Toro tse Sekete (2015) and Second-hand Reading (2016). His stage productions include A Memory of how it feels (2010), The Flower of Shembe (2012), The Heart of Redness (2015) and MAKEdbA (2018). An alumnus of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD (2016), he was also Composer-in-residence of the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival (2017), the National Arts Festival (2017) and the Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival (2018). He tours widely as a solo performer, bandleader and choral conductor.

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This session is being organised in collaboration with the ICS T.B.L. Webster Fellowship.