Faculty of Humanities
School of Arts
Department of Drama
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
This research was presented at the 2009 South African Visual Arts Historians Conference. It aims to investigate gender identity in the films Faith like Potatoes (2006) and Hansie (2008), focusing on how these films place these notions in redemption narratives. The researcher sees both films as forming part of the religious vitalisation of South African cinema, with takes redemption narratives and infuses them with a clear affirmation of so-called “traditional” Christian Afrikaner constructions of identity – reminiscent of De Voortrekkers (Shaw, 1916), overtly locating individual salvation and redemption in organised religion, while reaffirming problematic gender roles in the post-apartheid South African cinescape.
The films’ male protagonists’ redemption serves to maintain a discourse of submission, first before God and then before man. The male protagonist is aligned with the Father, while he carries gendered authority himself in his relationship with his wife (and with other secondary characters) and “fathers” (literally and metaphorically) others. Faith like Potatoes (Van den Berg, 2006) and Hansie (Van den Berg, 2008) not only manage to present female characters that are interchangeable between the films (there is nothing that sets Jill and Bertha apart, except maybe that Jill is more of a “mother”), but also female and black characters, whose presence in the plot remain epiphenomenal.
The study represents a variety of associated ideas that problematise the content and language of both film texts, each (but mainly Faith like Potatoes) presenting a religious grand narrative that legitimises white normativity and male dominance, while constructing contentious religion-based notions of gender as associated with prescribed binary ideas about masculinity and femininity. The films’ moments of confirming and affirming masculinity are placed in a safe, non-subversive, classical Hollywood narrative form, which present a clear resolution at the end of the film. Although the classical Hollywood narrative is still seen as the dominant way of making films and telling their stories, the use of this dominant narrative model reinforces the idea that what is seen on screen is “natural” and “acceptable”. There is no attempt in any of the two films to subvert or even question the ideology of patriarchy or to destabilise the visual language (camera shots, angles, editing techniques, framing devices) of the classical Hollywood narrative that helps to maintain dominant ideas of power relationships.
Contact person: Mr CW Broodryk.
This research investigates the idea of applied theatre’s ability to create a space of freedom within a system of formalised power, in this instance the South African prison system. Applied theatre, which often places a spotlight on social issues and concerns, may not yet be able to provide answers to the specific community. However, it can articulate challenges and questions that can be utilised to engage a specific community, and encourage them to voice and express their own solutions. Ideally, this voicing and expression will aid in the individual and community’s shift from a position of being oppressed to one of freedom. The complexity of the change from oppression to freedom underlines the importance of the analyses of the drama or theatre work itself as potentially the prime “object” of study for this field of research.
The basics of Theatre in Prison may stay constant, but it is possible, through engaging with other disciplines (in this case, the departments of Social Work and Criminology, and Psychology) to explore new ways of packaging the application of theory (applied theatre). With reference to the interdisciplinary research done by the departments of Drama, Social Work and Criminology, and Psychology, this research will trace and interrogate the development, performance and outcomes of at least six different performances in the male juvenile pre-trial section of the C-Max prison in Pretoria. Indeed, a small space or fissure exists between the practised smile and the panoptic eye of the criminal, where applied theatre may be able to forge a little bit of freedom and challenge authority.
Focusing on the idea of theatre for/with/by the oppressed, it is of the utmost importance that drama and theatre in prison find new ways to transcend new kinds of repression, oppression, exploitation and injustice. The complicity and interrelationship of various issues that constitute a spider’s web of HIV/AIDS, rape, domestic violence, physical abuse and others social concerns, is addressed and illustrated by various performances.
Contact person: Mr J A Visser.
The aim of this research was to demonstrate how innovation in lateral approaches to teaching drama texts can result in enhanced learning for the students. Speaking at the 2009 Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA) Conference, the researcher referred to her personal experience of teaching Greek plays to second-year students in Drama and Film Studies. In previous years, these classes tended to be viewed as tedious and uninspiring to the modern-day youth. The course was lecturer-driven and students had to prepare for class by reading plays and other prescribed reading materials (which they very seldom did). The academic demands of the course were high and students had little interest in ingesting factual information or in exploring a variety of arguments and viewpoints related to the learning material.
Her choice of using drama to teach drama is based on Dorothy Heathcote’s teaching methodology and philosophy that stresses the importance of child/student-centred learning. She mentions the importance of allowing the student to take important decisions during a lesson in order for them to feel that they are shareholders in the learning process and that they are not empty vessels to be filled. Every student has prior knowledge and experience that can be harnessed and integrated into the learning content. Knowledge and understanding are collectively generated, not transmitted to students. When students feel that the learning content is relevant to their personal contexts, they are more likely to engage with the learning material in a meaningful manner. Using drama to teach students about drama implied that students would not only read the plays, but perform them in ways that would demonstrate their theoretical understanding of the plays, while revealing the contemporary relevance.
In addition, detailed and timely feedback after each performance by means of class discussions helped motivate the students to reflect and consolidate aspects of the course content, redirect thinking, identify problem areas and provide a profile of student learning up to the point of assessment. This method of teaching has proved to be successful since 2001. Class attendance figures soared to full attendance in the majority of classes. Furthermore, students are now actively involved and participate in class discussions in a more informed manner than before.
Contact person: Dr E Zeeman.
This research investigated the ways in which the use of performative inquiry can shift notions of knowledge as situated to knowledge as experiential, embodied and an in situ encounter in the domain of performance studies. This research focused specifically on understandings of knowledge around the articulation and construction of identity with specific reference to the production Shiftings (2007). Shiftings was conceptualised as an extension of an undergraduate theoretical module that explores the ways in which contemporary theatre practices can position the performer as site/sight upon which hegemonic constructions of identity are played out, subverted or questioned.
The production and working process towards the production were prompted by students’ perceived lack of identification with and understanding of the learning content. Stressing multiple ‘I’s’, allowed students to acknowledge and speak as multiple selves, yet integrating these selves in the moment of doing, and uttering and framing that as a simultaneously reflective experience in the frame of the performance. The performative inquiry thus allowed students to embody multiple reflective stances. The multiple overlaps in modes of engagement with the process of the performative inquiry allowed performers to self-reflexively problematise identity and their subject positions, recognise the performative aspects of identity, and make visible the mechanisms of identity construction. The performative inquiry positioned students as witnesses to the ways in which they became active agents in generating knowledge.
The researcher’s reinterpretation of performative inquiry offered her an appropriate methodological approach to teaching and learning that served the students’ learning preferences and the demands of the module. It made use of narrative as a central force in performance and identity constructs to offer a personalised, experiential, embodied engagement with knowledge. It demonstrated how conceptual and academic thinking translates into performance practice. Performative inquiry not only made it possible for students to come to terms with the course content, but encouraged them to reposition, reiterate and reimagine themselves in their wor(l)ds. An article on this research was accepted for publication in the South African Theatre Journal.
Contact person: Prof M-H Coetzee.
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