 because we're trying to build an ongoing conversation around basically the future of theater, the future of theater pedagogy. It all started at the top of the pandemic when we wanted to explore how do we go forward during this time and then we realized that we are just constantly working towards figuring out a future for which we are not rehearsed. And that's how this whole conversation started and then Amy ran a beautiful series in the second half of the first season of these conversations and then we just realized that these conversations can endure and grow on and that's what we're doing. We're just holding space and now joining us in the space holding is Moenya Kabwe and Geni N'charri who are both who are both I'm just always proud of the fact that I can say the word. Yeah who are both really have joined us as co-conspirators, co-curators. Each of the four curators is on some kind of a quest where we're trying to figure out something we're trying to ask questions but the conversation but the quest is a is a quest that is that is joined by all of you and so without any further ado and you can always look at all of the conversations online they're all on the drama school Mumbai website and Falguni has given you a link to the videos for season one but you can just go to the website and get everything over there because they're also like reported pieces there little excerpts and summaries of each and every conversation that Falguni has written quite well. So without further ado I open the floor and give it to our curator for the day. Geni, all yours. Hi, hello everyone. Thank you Jayhan. Yeah so you would have seen that today's discussion is broadly focused on this question of what I guess a new African kind of classicism might look like in the theatre really want to kind of tease apart this question of firstly the relationship to kind of a European or quote unquote colonial theatrical inheritance and also to think about how we might imagine new forms that are both responding to that history but perhaps also open up a new terrain for articulating on a space that might sit outside of that realm entirely. As Jayhan's already said I am joined today by colleagues Mark Fleischman from the Central Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and London Motor as well. They also work with the Magnet Theatre and I'm going to quickly ask them to introduce themselves just to tell us a bit about themselves and their work before we launch into the meat of the discussion. Mark, can I hand over to you to say quickly. You can go first seniority. I think my ancestors would be really angry if I go first. The adult must go first, the elder. Okay good morning, good afternoon everyone wherever you are. As Mugenie said, my name is Mark Fleischman. I am professor of theatre at the University of Cape Town in the centre for theatre arts and performance studies and co-artistic director of Magnet Theatre. I've been in these two positions for a very long time for over 30 years and my interests I suppose are currently I'm working on a project which is reimagining tragedy in the global south with a particular focus on Africa together with Mandla and various other people. But I have in the past been involved with various projects that bring the practice of theatre and performance and research together in various ways and have run a number of multi-year thematic projects around remembering in the post colony and about migration in Africa broadly speaking. So that's kind of the work that I do as I said I also work in magnet theatre together with Mandla and Jenny Resnick and we Magnet is a theatre company, a 30 year old South African independent theatre company that focuses well started off as what we call the physical theatre company but has developed into something more than that I think with a much broader sense of theatrical practice. Thanks Mark. Good morning and good afternoon or evening to everyone. My name is Mandla Mbottwe. I also work for the University of Cape Town for the Centre for Theatre Dance and Performing Arts Studies and also I am the co-artistic director for Magnet Theatre working with Mark and Jenny Resnick. I also found a director for my company called Mad and Fire Parables. Mark have extended what magnet theatre is and what we do. Over and above I've also been one of the people that spearheaded what we call the Community Groups Intervention and now it's called Catcher Games where we find the way of reaching the gap between the mainstream kind of theatre and the sideline or marginalised communities within the arts industry. And also I think my interest of work has always been around what I call the excavation of the buried stories to feed the living, looking at what the intergenerational trauma has done, but also working from the premise of knowledge that we are a wounded society and my theatre has always been in search for healing, but the healing that is based on what has been buried by colonialism and apartheid when it comes to theatre and performance and my work has always been that both in language and in aesthetic and in content of the work that I went. So hence I've always been into archives in a way and search for the hebs, what I call the hebs, in trying to mitigate and engage in the process of searching for healing, not as a director or a scriptwriter, but also as a facilitator of the process of theatre making within its own processes. Okay, and that speaks to my work at the University of Cape Town. When I teach, my work is based on that, it's based on those diversifying forms of Uka La Paku, meaning starting from me before I go out and acknowledge what that means in things. And I'm also involved with Mark with Returns Products Project, which looks at the great classical work through the eyes, African eyes and Global South. And I'm in the process of refusing the frame and finding the frame that is before that frame in looking for those kind of tragedies in African context, if that makes sense. Yeah, that's me. Great. Thank you, Manda and Mark. So I guess a useful place for us to start might be in addressing you know the kind of quote unquote key term that seems to be an interesting discussion and this question of classicism, I guess, or the classics and in the context of Africa. So that's where I'm going to start. I'm interested in hearing a little more about what you think this notion of the classical means and what work it does discursively, whether in terms of you know, your choices on making theater or how you teach theater. And kind of thinking a little about what's at stake in bounding out to terrain that we define or name as the classical, especially in the context like South Africa, like I just pointed out, we're engaging with kind of dealing with colonial inheritance through various practices, we call it an excavation, one other thing, as a means of healing, there seems to be a kind of distinct relationship between the work that you're interested in during the outcomes of that work. And I'm interested in thinking more on how it turns around this reimagining or repositioning of what the classics might meet in our context. And that can be in terms of working magnet or it's a general question. You can, I mean, it's to both of you, I guess. So perhaps, Mark, you could start by telling us a little about how that affects your work with magnet or how that kind of reveals this thinking in some way. I don't mind. Either or. Either or. So I want to start off by saying that that we didn't choose this topic. So it was kind of placed in front of us. And so I'm going to try to think through some of these things on the fly, so to speak. So the first, when I think of the concept of classicism or the classics, I imagine them in three, that sense in three ways. The first is classicism or the classics as pertaining to the particular Greco-Roman literary or dramatic tradition that has been inherited into our context through colonialism. So that is one very circumscribed, if you like, way of understanding the classics. And it's still the way that it's taught in our university and in most other South African universities, the classics are Greek, Greek and Rome. The second is to understand classicism as something worth that defines excellence or distinctiveness that has a timeless significance, a kind of enduring value that becomes foundational over time. And the third is classicism as that which is pre-modern, that which the modern emerges from or sets itself against. And in terms of the first thought, I'm interested in the ways in which that particular Greco-Roman tradition, but in my case, particularly the Greek tragedies of the first century BC, is mobilized under colonialism both by the settler communities or the colonizer communities and the reaction by the so-called colonized or indigenous communities or native communities. And then in the second instance, the place of this body of work in the post-colonial. So what does it mean now, in South African terms, post-apartheid for this? What is its persistence and what is its relevance on how does it function in this time? And to a great extent, that is what is being explored under the retakes banner. The second and third definitions, if you like, are related to the question of whether there are alternative classicisms, whether there are plural senses of the classics that go beyond that Greco-Roman tradition. And in that respect, the answer on one level is obviously yes, they are. And it's easier to see or clear in some contexts outside of the Western European context than in others. So for example, in the Indian context, it's quite, it has been argued for a long time that there and the British colonial machinery recognized this from very early on that there was a very clear, distinct classical tradition existing within what we now call India that goes back for centuries. And to that extent, according to Harish Trivedi, for example, the Greek and Latin texts were not taught within the colonial education system in India in the way that they were taught throughout Africa because of the existence of the Sanskrit tradition. In Africa, the situation is much more complex because there is no obvious written or literary classical tradition of aesthetics to draw on. So then the question arises, is it possible to describe an oral traditional tradition as being a classical tradition? Because in some sense, and this is something that Manda has mentioned before, is there a distinction between tradition and a traditional form and a classical form? So in that sense, is the traditional something owned by a group that is a particular cultural group owns their traditions and whereas the classical is something that is produced by individual individuals within that group. So it might be based on a tradition, but it has its own individual manifestation in some kind of way. So that's one question. Can we understand the and now I'm again need to make a distinction that I'm to a large extent, even though I use the word I'm using the word Africa, really referring to Southern Africa because the situation becomes far too complex when we start to move around the rest of the continent, because they clearly are much longer traditions of writing that exist in other parts of the African continent, and particularly in relation to those parts of the continent that were influenced by Islam from a very early stage. But in Southern Africa that doesn't occur to the same extent. And so what you get is a much more established and long standing tradition of traditions, let's say traditions of reality in forms like storytelling, poetry, dance, song, cycles, etc, etc. So that's one sense in which we can understand the classicism. The other sense is what I would call a more modern classicism. And in the South African context, I'm referring to the beginnings of written literary output, particularly by Black South, what we now call South Africans in the late 19th century and early 20th century. So the particular writings of people like the Jabalus or Ezekai and A'aii or Herbert Lorne or Saul Pleike, etc. So that was really at the cusp of what we might call African modernity or Southern African modernity emerging out of that kind of oral cultural base or foundation. Now in both of those cases, I think you can see these things in like as opposite or as two sides of the coin. Because on the one hand, in terms of definition too, where the classicism is something which is distinctive and has timeless significance and everyone like that, clearly these forms need to be valued. And we need to find a way to value these forms relative to the impositions of Western forms that came in through colonialism. On the other hand, in terms of the definition three, which is classicism as anything that is pre-modern, there is a kind of reduction of these forms to what we might call the folkloric or something other than culture, something other than art, something that is not quite up to the mark, so to speak. Everything that existed before, in our case, the modern theater was introduced into Southern Africa. It doesn't quite have the same status. So the questions really revolve around what in I suppose the various methods or approaches that have been taken in the process of what might be called decolonialist thesis as described by Walter Minilow and Ricardo Vasquez, for example, in the Latin American context. The ways in which we go about a, historicizing, b, delinking, three, creating pluralities and bringing forth that which has been silenced, giving status to that which has been denigrated as a result of the colonial imposition, not so much as a way of saying this rather than that, but understanding a plurality, as they say, of different kinds of classicisms, different kinds of foundations for the kinds of contemporary work that might be happening in what we might call the post-colonial. Yeah, thank you, Mark. That was incredibly rich and I especially like how the three definitions that you're working through identify different kinds of impulses that may undergird how we choose to kind of frame this idea of the classics. And I'm particularly taken by the kind of common sense understanding, I guess, of the classics as something that we kind of attach a value proposition to, or that we're trying to produce a kind of value that may have not been marked in the past, out of, but also this idea of perhaps a kind of modern classical tradition that emerges after a particular point as the beginning of that. And you know, and then also I want to circle back to this idea of the gesture of historicizing, delinking, and creating pluralities, right, as a response to these inheritances. But this is something that I obviously see at work in your work too, is this explicit insistence on taking those non-literary forms, so kind of the oral historical forms that our culture of connectedness grounded in here, as seraceous one might have those original kind of European texts, right, that tend to drown the dramatic tradition. I wonder if you could speak a little more about your work and how you're kind of tacking towards the beginnings, right, of how you create, like what inspires you, why you choose the stories you do, and what you believe the politics are in those particular kinds of choices that you're making. Well, I think in my introduction, I mentioned briefly what inspires me or what drives me to create the work that I create. And I think, I mean, just to draw a little bit of my background that, you know, it started in high school as I was a political educator who's responsible to mobilize, politicize, and organize the students during late 80s in a way. And finding out that actually speeches and rallies alone don't really inspire what we wanted to do with the students that resulted in us actually finding different ways of engaging with students. And we didn't look that far. We looked at our practices and our cultural and traditional practices that are performative in a way of passing that kind of a message. And for me, that has always been an inspiration of educating, empowering, and dealing with illnesses of our societies. And even now, that has evolved, of course, you know, through my work and by looking at what, by realizing the fact that as a nation, as a society, particularly the Black people that we are really wounded and something has been stolen from us and we have been stripped of our identity. And at the heart of that, it was a systematic kind of journey of colonialism and apartheid to attack the confidence of Black people in both in language, in performing art forms, in traditional practices that hold the society together. So my work has always been this thing of classic or classicism that you are referring to in my head, because of every time we refer to that, we refer to Europe. And it has always been better, bigger, and if you deal with it, you'll be successful, as opposed to when we do the home teaching or the traditional dance, which you can trace as far as long before the arrival of the colonialism is not regarded as that, as even if you see it right through into the future, even now that it has a particular value and it draws a particular kind of influence and it has endured in terms of the time. Both even in singing songs, and Mark mentioned the oral tradition of storytelling, those things were not recognized as classics. And I kept on, I was taught that by them, I was quite agitated about that, that when there's a festival of dance, it will say that there's a classical festival of dance, but you won't see any kind of traditional dancing or genres that actually form their parts as far as before the colonialism. So for me, I have always been bothered by that in a way. And in a way that I've just started even the terminology itself, I didn't mind, I was creating work, not in reference to what it was not part of us, but in reference to us searching for that identity, but also feeding into the confidence. You know, if you want to kill the nation, if you want to kill a person, take away his or her confidence of himself or herself. If you take it away, that person can become anything. And if my work and my theater or the theater that I do and the storytelling in a way that is based on cultural practices, rituals that we grew up with, that re actually introduce and resurface these practices of strong performative kind of nature in our society, then for me, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing really. So hence I recognize my theater and the ways of teaching in that theater that opens up a platform for all of us as plurality and interdisciplinary work as a search for that particular healing. And I think for me that has always been the future. It evolves because illnesses of the society will always be there. So like the poets, like praise poets, the classical praise poets in an African context, that they are kind of praising, they are kind of practice as always involved depending on the illnesses of that particular society or the illnesses of that particular individual that they're responsible to drive and direct the community. So my theater responds to those illnesses and at this particular moment is the illness and the wound of coloniality, not really colonialism but the results of what have survived colonialism. That actually it's in our system, it's in our academic system, it's in our language and how do we begin to engage with that through theater and in our teaching. When I say theater I mean performing arts really or creative expressions that we're involved with. I think for me it starts with terminology. I'm always bothered by these technologies because they always refer to particular things that actually disregard the actual disregard of other people and other people's practices and it's always undermines that. And unfortunately the wound that we talk about or the illness that we talk about that we, the victim drives that. We teach our children the same thing. We think that actually classical music is much more better, much more beautiful and much more done than the actual tradition kind of music. We drive those systems and that kind of education. And I think it's, I mean we were talking the other day with Mark, I was saying that I'm not the theater or the performing arts that we are thinking is the future for us, is the realization that a particular important side or a recipe in what we have been cooking all along in this particular, in this soup, we have left out a huge element of black recipe and we've been actually being part of that cooking. All we are asking, all I'm asking is that is the recognition of that and how do we excavate it, how do we recognize that a huge particular taste that might take us forward as a nation is being left aside. It's been possibly archived or buried or intentionally being sidelined so that it can yield and feed into other cultures. And the future to recognize that and act upon it. Yeah, you know and as a way of turning towards this question of aesthetics, it's very clear to me that we're invested in this politics that is about perhaps reclaiming these terms so that they account for a sense of plurality and even this kind of plural classes and so I think it's the term that Mark used earlier on. But as a way of, I guess one of the things that I find really interesting here is the observation that you make is that in some ways those in the European or kind of literally grounded dramatic traditions, there's a conflation between the traditional and the classical is that for example, ballet is spoken about as a kind of classical dance form and the subtext is classical European but I think as somebody mentioned in the previous talk, we're not talking about ballet as an ethnic art form for example, whereas dance that emerges from the same kind of period from the same sort of history within Africa would be considered like ethnic African dance. So there isn't that equivalent kind of meeting point of recognizing the traditional things that have been sustained over a kind of long delay as he said yesterday, Mark, as having same status as these kind of classics from Europe. And I guess two questions here is what then do we think the status of the European classics should be in our contemporary context given the history that we've come from and given that there is this imbalance, this disequilibrium between the kinds of histories and practices and aesthetics that are privileged in for example our teaching environments and the need to disinter indigenous forms from beneath that historical weight and perhaps over determination in European forms. Is the first part of my question is, do we see any value in in cleaving to those traditions or is the work around reimagining and remobilizing them to new purpose now? And then second question is around what your work kind of looks like then in response to that and how the aesthetic choices you're making in some ways reflect on the politics that shape your work. Is there place for something we might call the European canon in recovering settler colony like South Africa or should we be discarding these forms altogether babies with bath water and all that? I don't think the question is should yeah no I was going to say Bongena also I am very aware of trying to engage of fighting and losing battle in a way so there is no way that we can discard or get rid of what we have learned. Something is embedded in us it will never be innocent from the global influences no matter how negatively those global influences came to us. It is part of our identity now. So I cannot unlearn what I've learned through UCT since 1994 up and true to my masters in a way I cannot that will always serve as both consciously and or unconsciously as an influence to the work that I do. What I'm conscious of is that something has been denied which was me I want to bring me into that particular table and say this is me you know and I want that kind of tension to create that particular kind of work that I'm creating. So in a way you know we cannot seek for purity because we will never have one that's quite a waste of time I think. So in a way we will always be an interdisciplinary holding multiplicity as individual also as a society and as a nation and we grow intercontinental, inter-cultural, inter-traditional we grow. We grow through many practices of our society. They might be politically or they might be just for the mere fact that I got married to someone else from the other tradition so we grow in a way. When I watch a piece of theater I will not be able to delete it in my head that it has inspired me or whatever it is even if it's negative or what. So I think for me what is quite important in the conversation is the realization is a realization that one particular part that is so important in the identity of our nation has been ignored its existence it has been denied its platform and it has been silenced and that that's what cause and feed into the sickness and the violence of our society. That's one part if we if we can just realize that even by simple thing by understanding that the fact that the particular language that is dominant in our country is not seen as an academic language it's problematic. We are continuing playing and perpetuating the violence in the black body and in the black memory and and up until we realize that but also up until we realize that there are other sources of knowledge that existed and they still exist and we still put them as not out of our teaching and not part of our academic is not part of being smart or intelligent we are still digging graves for those identities and we are only causing violence people getting sick people are sick all over it in a way and I think as in the art industry and if in our work we should always find those points and those moments of saying that what does it mean what does it mean to put all this diversity in one place what does it mean what does it mean plural what plurality means in our time but what interdisciplinary means in our time when we speak of of of the coloniality project and for me that's what it is that's what it is it's it's it's it's putting pieces of what seems to be in contradiction and put them together even if they cause tension it is through that tension that progression will make sense and will find ways but anyway it is through those tension that a magical production or performance actually comes together it is the multiplicity it is multiple voices that comes together for me do you understand it is the group of people coming to a particular place and going pray for that rain than an individual sitting in their room praying for that rain don't say it is an allowance it is an allowance of an overgrowing performance that one the one that is not changed by a particular script that cannot move in any form or any direction it is the script that is going for the people are doing it at that particular moment for me that's that's that's that's that I also hear there thank you I also hear there an interesting suggestion about the relationship between the individual and the community right as is perhaps how we value the one in relation to the other but just wonder what you're saying also links to what I was saying or what Mark was putting down about historicizing and can create some pluralities right as front of a better way as a decolonial impulse that is open to us as practitioners but Mark you're saying that the question isn't necessarily should we I'm not about should we do anything I mean I think I think at the end of the day the way that I look at it is we and and recently Mark with Mondani published a book in which he described the South African post-apartheid situation in such a way that where he described all those who remain after apartheid as survivors of the catastrophe and that those survivors whether they were who were previously enemies in a civil war became opponents in a democratic state whether they liked that or not and so what we what we have at the moment is a is a situation in which all have to battle out in the marketplace of ideas so to speak political ideas for for a degree of power within that state structure for me the catastrophe of colonialism or apartheid produces a landscape which can be defined in various ways but I like to think it as a pile of ruins and in that ruined space there are there are a whole lot of remainders right and those remainders cannot be simply removed or got rid of or wished away in fact that produces the tragic sense of the post-colonial moment because in that sense you might not want to be there or you might not want to be with the people that you are with but you don't have an option you have to find a way to be together and this is the what is so interesting for me about tragedy not as a form necessarily inherited from ancient Greece but as a concept is the sense of of its of of being caught in a situation from which there is no obvious exit there is no simple way out there is only have the need or the necessity to engage with with the reality as it plays itself out so so this idea of of individual freedom or the right or or my my my freedom to do whatever I want is limited by the reality that we find ourselves in and that reality which has been shaped by colonialism produces this ruined landscape which is full of contradiction full of paradox full of struggle and one of the things so recently I I did a talk in the Netherlands about this project and thinking about productions and re-workings of classical texts and I described a particular walk that I've done often in a particular part of of the country here and in that walk which involves leaving from a particular domesticated farm space and moving into the the bush so to speak and along the way encountering a ruin and that ruin having a particular history and a particular politics attached to it and that ruin being doing a number of things one of which was to stop me in my tracks another one which is to force me to think in a particular way about the politics of the place about the story of the place but one of the things that the ruin does in this particular instance is it also hides the real reason why I went on that walk in the first place which is that further along the path is a cave and in that cave are paintings produced by the Sam people the first hunter-gatherer communities the first indigenous peoples of the western Cape certainly and and that particular cave is hidden in so many ways it's physically hidden by a whole almost veil of thorn trees that stop people from easily getting to them but they also hide so if you didn't know when you were walking along that path that there was a cave there you would never go in and engage with those paintings but the ruin is on the path the ruin doesn't allow doesn't hide it's there in full view and it arrests progress in that way and so for me I'm interested in this relationship between the cave and the ruin I'm interested in this relationship between the ruins preeminence and predominance in the landscape the way it shapes a particular way of understanding the world and experience in sense terms and then the the cave which remains hidden remains occluded in some kind of way but also contains this very interesting classical tradition the other thing that that brings up just by the way is the question of material classicism so the the way in which we've spoken about a reality and literacy but also the sense in which the material constructions painting sculpture and those kinds of things material culture broadly also produces a kind of classical tradition and in that sense you know I think the painting for example of the song people which is also connected to and has been shown to be connected very strongly to a body of storytelling and to a series of ritual practices trans practices for example is a very important element in this whole discussion I suppose when I'm thinking about the place that as you say I don't think that anybody needs to do anything with the room unless they want to if they choose to it provides something that they can use and to that extent I need to make the point that we're talking about classicism here but the work that we make hasn't is not classical it's contemporary it's the work that we're making now in a sense about our experience of now and in that sense the classics operate in a foundational way they operate in a way that produces the originating or determining conditions for the contemporary right so they they're not they don't we're not talking about necessarily going back so when when I do Antigone I'm not doing Antigone as Antigone I'm doing Antigone for contemporary present day purposes now as a contemporary piece of theater I'm not saying I'm doing this as a piece of classical theater in in my own work I think what I've seen in this is the development from a kind of what I would call narrative approach so so I think there are three phases in which the classics as in the Greek tragedy for example has manifested in South Africa you have the early stage where where things are just produced as a kind of as if there was a correct way of doing them right yeah and they've been done in order to show this is the correct way this is what makes these things so great this is this is real theater right the second phase of the phase where people here begin to take those works and particularly from a narrative perspective they begin to relate the story of that work to the political conditions that they want to highlight so the work that say an apple few god does in the South African context with plays like his arrestee's project or the island for example um are his attempt to take the story out of the Greek tragedy and to use it to make a political point in that particular period but more recently I think the adaptations are much more archival coming back to Amanda's use of the archive in the sense of seeing the play as part of this archival uh archive and then taking from it what you want in order to produce something new not in order so so that the integrity of the narrative breaks down what you get in their ruins are a set of fragments and those fragments and the relationship between the original meaning of those works or the intention of those works and the way those works are being taken up and used in the present is breaks up breaks down right so so in a sense and and here I've spoken to Michael here if you take the perspective produced as put forward by Derrida around the difference between an inheritance and a debt right I think for for a theater maker like me coming from where I'm coming from in this context I am indebted to this tradition in a way that I think Mandela is not right um I think that that there is a difference and a debt is something that needs to be repaid at a certain point and there is a way in which that connection whereas in inheritance you supposedly can do anything you want to right so the question is um if there is no doubt to me that there is a joint inheritance here that that someone a theater maker like Mandela cannot ignore the way he has been formed he just said it right he has inherited this tradition and why shouldn't he inherit the tradition right just because it came from Europe he has inherited this tradition and he will make of the tradition what he wants he will take as he is now with he is taking home his odyssey and making home his odyssey work for his conception of the world he's not even taking home his odyssey he's taking fragments and using them in the way that he wants to use them to make his work but when I do Antigone I'm caught between the sense of indebtedness to this tradition that supposedly made me as a as a European as an African of European descent if you like as as part of that settler community right I have this this burden of debt that I am committed to this tradition in some kind of way um and in a sense I have to work very hard to to disconnect myself from the integrity of that of from the then an understanding of that as being in some way um of great distinctive value that it needs to be preserved in the way that it was written and the way that it was produced and then redone in an African context in some kind of way. Thank you. Yes. No just I mean to pick up some of the points that is been saying but also to try and relate to some of the things um that I mean is as the conversation is going on I'm just thinking about certain things that that also drives all that have become a pull factor to the work that I do and how I do that work I mean the other one is you know there's this notion that if it's returned down it's if and if anything is returned down it indicates it says it's as if it's it's the first thing or the first time to be done doesn't so so if you understand that if it has never been returned down in a way because of if it was really in a particular form it feels that they were the first people to do it so my first impulse when I deal with with the text and when I deal with concepts in the text when I deal with the particular stories even if that story comes from the other way I want to find out if such thing such structure such style existed even if it was never written so I think also there's those politics of orality and and the written work that there's quite a lot of of of of placing power in the written forms that that in a way it does delete the orality or the existence of something before it was written in a particular part of that of of that country and that that that's problematic I mean we see it in contemporary politics of of actors making work and stuff and it's written it becomes or it belongs to someone else that don't say that's also that's one part and then the other part I think my guess one of my desire was the fact that when we refer to the way that we do people will say that is so Kratoski that is so Stan Slavski that is so and I was desiring to say that that is so traditional oral tradition of storytelling you understand when when we see a physical theater when we see a musical theater I wanted to be to be able to say that that's so remind me of my grandmother's storytelling as a performance because of that can be traced and be linked into that particular place but because of the knowledge and education that we involve in denies those things and actually those experiences and those forms that every time we refer to certain things we continue giving power to the way that is written down and that is being dished upon ourselves and that's problematic even now in this conversation we continue doing that that don't understand that for me even if in 1920s the black intellectual started writing and all those things and we started realizing maybe that was it was one of the classical work of Isikosa but there were classical work of Isikosa of Wuni people long before the missionaries came long before they were educated and so it became part of the conversation because of it was written down so my right desire is to say that my work first and foremost is influenced by the oral tradition of storytelling of rituals and performing traditions that are happening in in my society and and I mean for me that's quite important I thought let me just let me just mention that and as a point of importance in our conversation yeah no great thank you and you know so yes I just want to point out that I think it's important to recognize that even within the so-called western tradition of performance there is this distinction that had developed historically over time between forms of popular performance if you like or forms of performance that were non-literally and driven by through the body often through practices of improvisational play etc and that's that tradition the most famous of which is obviously the commedia but but other forms of work was in a kind of competition with the literary it only a certain point that writing comes in and scripting of performances becomes something within even the western tradition and then slowly ahead Gemini begins to develop in which the dramatic is associated with a pre-written script right and all those other for one to be better word mime traditions kind of then take a secondary position they kind of slip into the margins because they're not real theater because they don't start from a written script in some kind of way and and all the skills associated with that the play and all of that becomes denigrated relative to the particular the way of playing um a written text because the predominant way of training active you know and I and I just been demand about this yesterday about the way we go about training actors so despite these discussions that we have we still conceptually think of the actor training in South Africa as beginning with or being determined by a script or scripting process of some kind and the the skills that an actor learns are the skills that start from the text so it doesn't matter how much we develop alternative ways of making through what we might call workshop theater or devising or or whatever we still have somewhere subconsciously the idea that what we are doing is making a text a script and the ability to free ourselves from the dominance of that script right and and if we go back to those African oral traditions and the storytelling traditions it's a completely different way of doing it the script emerges in the performance it doesn't exist prior to the performance what exists are a set of of images and a tradition of stories that are that are learned through participation over time but in the moment of performance the performance is is is happening extemporary that it's happening in an improvisational way related to the the particularities of that time and that place and the community and the community that is listening the so-called audience is a participant in those things it is part of the process of bringing forth the performance but we still don't teach our acting students to do that but I guess yeah but I guess Mark but I guess also by embarking on the devised processes of making theater with the group of people in a way you achieve that particular element because of you come into the particular space with a core image that core image might be a title but at the end the audience which is the first instance your cast members in that space they start bringing in a way that you you might not be just a storyteller but you are led and you are being led by the participant of making that theater so that freedom of different kinds of experiences of individuals that are bringing with construct what is called or what will be called in future a performance but during the making of itself you perform for each other in a way you can understand that you perform for each other using the coming being contained by that particular kind of image and then when in other instances for that matter in different kinds of of thing even if we are guided I think I guess you know the script also means that in our head it means that the the beginning and the end is clear in terms of the time frame because it must always be clear in terms of the time frame so there's be that kind of of container but the I think for me the allowance of its fragmentation within the contained kind of time frame and within the contained kind of core image that holds everything together the allowance of breathing it for me that for me it's quite important even in the performance because of that holds that kind of it's not scripted and it's not in a way um cut and stone it doesn't it must not be touched it allows itself to be to be changed and to be and to be shifted and and to allow the audience responses to to to actually influence the performance itself and stuff there are those kinds of performances that follow through through the process of making into the performance but there are those ones that I guess again we we are we are being imprisoned by the notion that if it needs to be professional and all those kinds of things it must end up with the script whatever processes you've gone through it must end up with something that's written down for it to be realized as something else as the script and as the professional theater and I think that's one of the great gents and and and guests in the room I must apologize I've been absolutely terrible facilitating here I've not been paying attention to the chat where some really interesting questions have come up because I've been so wrapped up listening to these lovely offerings but I think um John made a really interesting point here where he says you know it might be useful to bother him with the idea that a language quote is a dialect with an army and a navy um and then ask you know do enduring models the classical cultural practices only maintain the privileged status through political power and what you've both indicated in this last moment is the idea that writing perhaps begins to function in that way um John I don't know if I'm if I'm uh mistaking on your behalf forgive me but it seems to me that that that the army and the navy have in some ways been supplanted by the primacy of of the written text um whether in terms of that as the point of access to um how we train but also about how these these objects right that we create circulate after the initial event is that they become available in particular ways and the way that they become available also determines the kind of power that they might hold um internationally or outside of the spaces where we first encounter them um colleagues it's 11 or two where two minutes past the hour when the official conversation technically ends um but as is the practice we normally kind of carry on in a more informal way um after the hour for about 15 minutes or so um so I invite you to please continue hanging out and chatting with us but just to say thank you for those of you who do need to shoot because I know that we schedule for an hour um thank you for joining us again and thank you Mark and Mandela for your incredibly rich offerings here um and we continue and again if anyone has any questions please um also feel free to wave at me because my eye is as I said not necessarily watching the chat at every moment um but yeah on we go so um Jehan you also had an interesting kind of thought earlier on about the traditional versus the classical where we've moved on from there I just uh very quickly um I was just finding I thought it was fascinating I didn't feel like getting into any questions or thoughts of my own because listening to Mark and Mandela just sort of speak on everything was just such a great listen so thank you for that uh I do I I think I was just completely uh taken with this idea of traditional versus classical having this idea of produced by an individual in the group which is what Mark originally said and I just immediately thought of like how you know our current sort of idea of just ownership possession that is the product in which the power lies the fact that there's something recordable then recreatable and its role in all of this um but the other thing I'm seeing uh which I which I'm just trying to figure out how to to phrase is because something that Mandela said which is terminology undermined stuff but yet at the same time we're all in search for identity and that requires some kind of terminology and so there's this tension there that I'm thinking about um these are just really thoughts uh these are it's not it's not so much a statement because what I'm trying to figure out is what I'm trying to figure out over here is going forward how do we work towards this plurality uh in terms of our training methodologies in terms of the text in terms of the content in terms of the processes um and how much do they have to stay I mean I think everything we're doing is for the present and for the now everything we're teaching our students is for the present and we use like magpies from everywhere at least that's what our practice has been uh we take whatever serves our purpose for that moment and we throw throughout the rest um but at the same time it's almost like without the mindfulness of acknowledgement of where those things came from and whether they were things that are forced upon us or denied from us um and I'm just looking at all the dynamics at play and so what you've really done with this conversation has just opened up like the act of choosing the pedagogy the act of choosing the content the act of choosing the approach has all of the stuff that you both spoke about today um and so I'm trying to look at where I think my quest is is where there's a real plural plural plurality lie in terms of how we go about curating uh a learning and teaching experience for the next batch of drama school students um yeah great thank you um I see on guys on there has a hand up as well on guys on hi everyone and thank you for the conversation um I'll um mind the open mind less spoke about something that the the victim drives the wound and and it just it was quite interesting um in that it's a question for you here and so so in saying that the victim drives the wound it from your experience in how is does this happen in terms of representation and various representations are in performance and in terms of just the form that this wound is driven if you can I don't know if that question makes sense I'm trying but I just really I'm thinking through what you said and I it's it knows at me um hi August um I'm not sure if I remember was was clean up I think maybe let me first start with that that statement of what I meant for me um that the the one of the successes of colonialism and and apartheid was to make it in a point that whereas that it might seem not to be practiced but we the people that have been the victim of it carrying it on teaching it to our children um uh so in a way there are black people who still says that there is no point of is it cause or is it to look to their children because of the success for their children is based on English and in other forms so we drive that in in a way we become the victim become the perpetrators of that you know you know also that we see that also in in other elements we see that in gender based violence also in a way where where what don't you understand so and and and that for me it's the wound on its own you understand so so the work that we should be doing it should be in search for for for that healing so I had a conversation I said even if in in in is it cause a kind of making theater in the classroom my teaching and my directorial kind that is happening there is dominated by English do you understand so anyway while I'm trying to ascertain and and and and revive the beauty and the importance of physical in my own process is in a way that because of I'm the victim that I have no language that my memory of my own language is so far that I can't even reach even if I struggle doing that that the kids that I'm teaching themselves will take what I'm teaching and continue the similar thing that I do with them by doing so so in a way that I I think one of the things that we need to do I I think is but also I think that the challenge about searching for healing in a highly pressure time that we are so rushed that the time itself it's a we live in a microwave kind of time frame that things need to be done results need to happen now and all those kinds of things that certain kinds of transformation and dealing with with the actual wound is so rushed that I mean our society is so different we know that we were thrown rainbow bandages before even the wound was treated and and we live now in that time where the past is coming out and we need to deal with it but still the time frame of dealing with that wound is not enough the time frame of teaching what we want to teach in our universities is not enough because of the periods that we have and the time frame of the production that we have might not allow certain rituals or certain practices of performances that we like to reincorporate in our teaching the time always becomes the sense of in a way you know it's been stolen from us in a way so um uh um and you know I I mean I in the conversation that we've been having I mean with with mark I I even you know there was a there was a time that actually even I I think even now that I I I've accepted maybe that's a credit of things that we will never find healing do you understand but it is it is in the search of that healing that we become better people that we get little bit is into the pain that we suffer it is in that search and I think for me that's quite important but to say that one in one particular part of our lives we will find healing we will find we will find harmony in in this diversity we will find I I don't know but I think our it is to search for it and it is in that search of that meaning of that healing that the healing is in the process not in the end results so we all need to continue to go to the therapy because the moment you stop you go back to pain you can't stop it that's a tragedy of it I think that's what mark also referred to into that that search in such conversations and in such kind of thing so yeah sorry mongini so to go back to pedagogy question and and things that people have said like Alex said in the in the chat and Manda was talking about time and in relation to the difficulties of working within a colonial colonial imposed structure and epistemological framework within the university or the theater school in in in the South African context now the magnet training program tried to to deal with that in a different kind of way by not being so rigidly determined by time periods and by the necessity to do an exam by a certain date and to produce a set of results and do all of those kinds of things so in the beginning there was a much more organic approach to the pedagogy the the choice of of of exercise the choice of material the way we work was much more determined by the flow of what was happening in the room with the students and that felt kind of quite freeing relative to the experience of working in the university but Jenny and I were talking about this this morning that that in a sense over time the demands of the world outside and the demands of the industry and of the funders who put money into these programs and demand results in the form of how many people got jobs how many people were able to support their families as a result of this training means that the the the teaching closes down and we start to look for easy outcomes very clearly definable but quite superficial outcomes and a lot of those outcomes are based again on what the structure of the industry demands so the ability to work with a script the ability to read a text the the ability to interpret a character in the sense in which in the the western sense of the word all of those kinds of things become necessary in order to empower those graduates to be able to find jobs when they leave so that you can attract more funding right but in fact what that does is it works against those very processes that you had in place in the first instance which were not in the primarily text-based that that had open-ended periods of time that followed the development of this that particular student cohort as and what do they need as opposed to setting particular objectives and so it's it's a really difficult thing in in some way it's almost like the the the institutions in which we work produce a set of conditions that make whatever we want to do or what we believe in very difficult to achieve and and and that's a challenge i i don't know of a way of of being able to to overcome at the moment um yeah you're unmuting any apologies i'll say thank you and i want to circle back to that point in a second by asking other people to teach you know what their own thinking is around this um but before we do so i just wanted to give jhan a moment to um introduce next week's talk um and tell us a bit more about that before we close the official part of the session sorry i misspoke earlier on it's you know 15 not 11 which was my excitement at the hour um jhan uh yeah so thank you mark thank you mindblown behalf of all of us gathered here um for doing this and i hope you can come back to the next session uh and the session after that um because it seems to have picked up a thread from when your session last week um where we're really trying to figure out somewhere um how do we work with what we have all uh either inherited or taken on as debt to move forward and how do we teach with that uh or and my session uh next week is on a quest on on trying to see where in this big sort of landscape of you know pluralism and plurality where the universal truths and how can we work with them um the reason uh the person coming in is going to be Shankar Venkateshwar and he's just an amazing um theater practitioner uh he's trained in so many intercultural contexts and he's had a very fascinating journey over the last 20 to 30 years uh with working across cultures and across different landscapes of forms texts people production modes and he seemed to be of the opinion in my pre-chat with him that there's no such thing as the universal anymore and i want to challenge that because i keep uh i will start with a story about that um why we can teach at the drama school Mumbai with so many different people coming from so many different forms and and spaces of theater and yet try and make an uh a well-framed or well uh created theater maker um so that's my talk and then the week after that Amy continues the quest differently Amy you want to share um thanks Jehan yes i'll be inviting Paola Coletto and Dr. Cass Fleming for a discussion uh entitled masterless women teaching physical theater so we'll be having a subversive chat about um why it seems to be that um all the physical theater traditions almost all of them are named after men when in fact there were so many women uh developing them and practicing them so uh please join us for that um very uh interesting hopefully interesting conversation fantastic thank you both