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Past, Present, and Future: A Tense South Africa Performs

Past, Present, and Future: A Tense South Africa Performs PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE A Tense South Africa Performs Megan Lewis 33rd Annual National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa, June 28–July 7, 2007. T hirteen years after the official dismantling of apartheid, South Africa is still wrestling with its identity as a nation and a new democracy. The 2007 National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown, the world’s largest theatre festival outside Edinburgh, revealed a panoply of interrogative forms—from dance to theatre to visual art to stagings of personal identities—that explored the shameful past, the corrupt yet developing present, and the uncertain future. The politics of belonging, dislocation, gender, voice, and identity formation(s) echoed through the two-week, sunshinedrenched festival, which included offerings on a Main and Fringe circuit. The social debates and realities of contemporary Southern Africa informed and troubled much of the work at this year’s festival. To the north, Zimbabwe is collapsing under Robert Mugabe’s draconian leadership and South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) government refuses to intervene. As satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys describes it in his performance, Evita for President!, Zimbabwe is “a big black hole, a pigment of our © 2008 Megan Lewis imagination . . . Our policy of quiet diplomacy has been so successful http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art MIT Press

Past, Present, and Future: A Tense South Africa Performs

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art , Volume 30 (2) – May 1, 2008

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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2008 Megan Lewis
ISSN
1520-281X
eISSN
1537-9477
DOI
10.1162/pajj.2008.30.2.93
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE A Tense South Africa Performs Megan Lewis 33rd Annual National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa, June 28–July 7, 2007. T hirteen years after the official dismantling of apartheid, South Africa is still wrestling with its identity as a nation and a new democracy. The 2007 National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown, the world’s largest theatre festival outside Edinburgh, revealed a panoply of interrogative forms—from dance to theatre to visual art to stagings of personal identities—that explored the shameful past, the corrupt yet developing present, and the uncertain future. The politics of belonging, dislocation, gender, voice, and identity formation(s) echoed through the two-week, sunshinedrenched festival, which included offerings on a Main and Fringe circuit. The social debates and realities of contemporary Southern Africa informed and troubled much of the work at this year’s festival. To the north, Zimbabwe is collapsing under Robert Mugabe’s draconian leadership and South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) government refuses to intervene. As satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys describes it in his performance, Evita for President!, Zimbabwe is “a big black hole, a pigment of our © 2008 Megan Lewis imagination . . . Our policy of quiet diplomacy has been so successful

Journal

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and ArtMIT Press

Published: May 1, 2008

There are no references for this article.