Introduction

This special issue focuses on a production, Antigone (not quite/quiet), created and staged at the Baxter Theatre, in Cape Town, in 2019. The production was one of a number of similar productions created as part of the project: Reimagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South (ReTAGS), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation between 2019 and 2023. ReTAGS is a project that proposes to take a concept – tragedy – from the very beginnings of theatre in its European manifestation and therefore of the discipline of Theatre Studies which is decidedly European, and to reimagine it from a perspective in Africa that is at once directed at the complex challenges of our global postcolonial present and towards our possible futures both inside and outside of the theatre.

It is clear that there have been numerous adaptations and stagings of ancient tragedies by major writers and theatre-makers across the African continent, particularly through the period of anti-colonial struggle and the rise of independent nation-states after the Second World War. To name just a few on the continent: Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Femi Osofisan, J.P. Clark (Nigeria), Efua Sutherland (Ghana); Ebrahim Hussein (Tanzania), Sylvain Bemba (Congo Brazzaville), Saad Ardash and numerous others (Egypt), Athol Fugard and others (South Africa); Trinidad Morgades (Equatorial Guinea). In the Afro-diaspora: Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Félix Morisseau-Leroy (Haiti), Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), Derek Walcott (St Lucia). There is something about these plays and their playing that appeals to African theatre-makers, performers and audiences. ReTAGS has set out to interrogate this vast body of work produced in the theatres of Africa and its diaspora. Furthermore, and importantly for this special issue, it uses performance methodologies as analytical tools to gain purchase on the complex realities of the colonial aftermath by investigating current events in the postcolony beyond the theatre, through the ‘prism of tragedy’ (Quayson 2003, p. 56).

The project is inspired by a reading of the recent work of David Scott (2004; 2014) and of Hans-Thies Lehmann (2016). For Scott, in rough summary, the history of anti-colonialism and its aftermath has traditionally been framed through the trope of romance: the triumph of good after trials and tribulations. Such a framing is dependent on a utopian horizon towards which the narrative proceeds. This has led to a triumphalist narrative of salvation and redemption in which the evil colonial regime is overthrown by the steadfast persistence and bravery of the people and/or the anti-colonial hero who emerge victorious at the end. Scott examines the revisions CLR James made in 1963 to The Black Jacobins (originally published in 1938) to suggest a shift of the narrative framing to the trope of tragedy, and uses this to argue that tragedy as a framework for the emplotment of historical narrative is more appropriate to the actual lived reality of the ‘tangible ruins of our present, the congealing context of our postcolonial time’ (Scott 2004, p. 29). Here there is no longer a visionary horizon of new beginnings, but ‘a profound skepticism about the teleologies of nationalist and socialist liberation’ (Scott 2004, p. 97). In his second book, Scott goes on to link this tragic turn to a particular conception of time in which as he puts it:

the existential rhythms of that enduring relation between past, present and future have been broken … [and] a certain experience of temporal afterness prevails in which the trace of futures past hangs like the remnant of a voile curtain over what feels uncannily like an endlessly extending present. (2014, p. 6)

For Lehmann, most studies of tragedy focus on what he defines as ‘dramatic tragedy’, a particular form that arises in the Renaissance despite its foundations being laid centuries before by Aristotle in The Poetics. Such studies tend to ignore tragedy either in its non-dramatic forms (either pre-dramatic or post-dramatic) or as a theatrical art form which amounts to more than simply what is manifest in the written text. In other words, if we are to understand the tragedies of writers such as Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides, Lehmann suggests, we must take into consideration that they were never conceived or experienced as dramatic or simply as text-based artworks independent of their actuality in performance. Lehmann goes on to suggest that there are two broad conceptions of tragedy, what he calls the conflict model (following Aristotle, Hegel and Schiller) and the transgression model (following Nietzsche, Bataille, Lacan). The conflict model involves the repeated clash of powerfully irreconcilable differences, usually between personal autonomy and social and legal demands based on tradition and historical authority. The transgression model invokes ‘the power of rupture located in – and/or outside the subject’; an overstepping of borders and a display of excess that ‘may be ecstatic and singularly intense, yet … calls forth ruin’ (Lehmann 2016, p. 61). He suggests that while these two models are not mutually exclusive, a focus on dramatic tragedy leads most often to the former and that if we were to examine tragedy in non-dramatic modes, the latter, the transgression model, would come more into focus.

The ReTAGS project follows Scott in exploring the ways in which the time matrix beyond the formal colonial regime might be imagined as tragic rather than romantic, in order to shift the focus of inquiry beyond the triumphalism of how we got here to what we are experiencing now. Furthermore, it follows Lehmann in setting out to understand how (i) tragedy has been reconfigured in the post-colonial theatre; (ii) how moments of tragic ‘excess’ are enacted outside of the theatre in the course of revolts against neo-colonial establishments and forces; and, (iii) 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 postcolony, understood not only as those territories previously, and perhaps still in some senses, colonized, but the whole global neo-colonial complex that characterizes the world as it is emerging now across all hemispheres.

As indicated above, central to ReTAGS, and the production of Antigone (not quite/quiet), is a methodological focus on using the (re)making of tragedies, which is often the reassembling of tragic sources, as a way of thinking or as a method of conducting the research. In theatre and performance studies, to engage in practice is conventionally understood as participating with others in processes of doing performance or of making performance. This methodology is referred to by various names: ‘practice as research’, ‘performance as research’, ‘practice-based research’, or ‘artistic research’ all of which, in our opinion, amount to pretty much the same thing. It is generally accepted that what we are concerned with here is: research that is carried out through or by means of performance; using methodologies and specific methods familiar to performance practitioners; and where the output is at least in part, if not entirely, presented through performance. In other words, such activity suggests that there are certain epistemological issues that can only be addressed in and through the practice of performance itself.

Over time, this approach has developed a history, a number of structured organizations (PARIP; The Society for Artistic Research; The Performance as Research Working Group of the IFTR; The SenseLab etc) in different geographical locations, and a set of writings, a literature consisting of a body of key texts. And while these texts are by no means equally available or meaningful to all and the literature assembles and re-assembles differently according to regional specificities, understandings and proclivities, the literature ensures an element of legitimacy and a perception of stability to the practice. Veronica has written on the implementation of the method of practice as research in South African theatre and performance studies (Baxter 2013). Elsewhere, Mark has written extensively about practice as a modality of scholarship and its particular struggle for acceptance in the Humanities and in particular in theatre and performance studies (Fleishman 2009; 2012). He has been specifically concerned with the ways in which thinking through and by means of practice creates what Jacques Derrida refers to as ‘the ferment from which knowledge that does not yet exist may emerge’ using the ideas of anthropologist Tim Ingold to propose a way of knowing that unfolds laterally in an emergent way rather than vertically between various hierarchized layers or orders of knowledge from abstract to applied-embodied (2009, p. 121).

In addition, in the ReTAGS project there has been a sustained focus on the digital archiving of the processes of making, as opposed to the simple recording of the final outcomes. This is motivated by a desire to give other researchers access to the ideas, the thinking and the embodied experimentation that have led to the artistic decisions in the productions that make up the overall research project.

The authors of the articles assembled here reflect on the processes of making, performing and archiving Antigone (not quite/quiet), from their own differing perspectives and positionalities. Mark, as acknowledged director of Antigone (not quite/quiet), frames the discussion that will follow in other articles. He discusses his role of dramaturg, how the ongoing exchanges of voice, image, objects, sound, light make up a dramaturgy of encounter. This dramaturgy is not centred on one authorial voice nor on a fixed text but celebrates the interweaving of collaborative creation. He provides a partial glimpse of the three episodes that made up the production, which he argues has an ‘anarchival’ (Derrida 1995) relationship to Sophocles’ Antigone. His account illustrates the playful, disruptive dramaturgy in the crafting of the production, the condition of postcolonial ‘afterness’ in the South African psyche and theatre that gives rise to discomforting, ‘monstrous figures’ that refuse to stay quiet.

Writing from the perspective of being a White, Afrikaner woman in a Chorus of bodies representing Antigone, Kanya Viljoen explores the contradictions of belonging to the so-called Born Free generation, South Africans born after the collapse of apartheid. In the article she problematizes her experience as that of (un)belonging, as a sole White body in a Chorus of Black bodies. Viljoen analyses herself as individual within a Chorus and society where whiteness has already taken up too much space, and belonging is contested in the fragmented postcolonial condition.

Balindile Ngcobo draws on the mythological heroine-martyr trope in her discussion of the production of Antigone (not quite/quiet). She asserts that the trope of strong Black women is perpetuated in most African adaptations of Antigone, calling this mbokodofication. The term is drawn from a Nguni saying and freedom song, ‘you strike a woman, you strike a rock’ (Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ mbokodo). Ngcobo argues that this saying perpetuates and increases the trauma held in women’s bodies. She then moves to discussing herself as performer in the production (2019), which coincided with vicious attacks on women in South Africa. Her on-stage and off-stage experiences resulted in a heightened, remembered trauma.

Lekan Balogun offers a reading of Antigone (not quite/quiet) through the lens of Wole Soyinka’s idea of the Fourth Stage (1976), and through violence against African migrants to South Africa. He suggests that a key aspect of Soyinka’s thought, ‘communal creativity’, is echoed in the production’s making, which resists the Euro-American ‘creative individualism’. Balogun then introduces the Yoruban figure of Ògún, who symbolizes ‘resistance and agency’, linking these ideas to the escalating violence in South Africa. He argues that the three-part structure of the production, (an old Ismene, a chorus of young Antigones and the seer, Tiresius) echoes Soyinka’s ‘Fourth Stage’ in showing the ‘world of the dead, the world of living, and the world of the unborn’.

Christina Wald productively compares Thomas Köck and Magnet Theatre’s productions of Antigone as ‘postdramatic reassemblages’. She argues that Köck’s interpretation in antigone. a requiem explores European culpability for migrant deaths while Magnet Theatre’s Antigone (not quite/quiet) shows an interregnum between the colonial past and the liberation yet to come. Ismene and the Chorus are compared across both productions. In Magnet Theatre’s production, Ismene is reassembled as the pathos of White self-pity and shame, and the polyphonic and multilingual Chorus as Antigone’s scream of rage of a ‘revolution delayed’ (from the unpublished script of Antigone (not quite/quiet)).

Jayne Batzofin and Sanjin Muftić discuss the development of a digital, ‘living’ archive. Using the production of Antigone (not quite/quiet) as example, the article describes capturing and curating the ephemeral processes of performance making. Not content with a simple record of the final production, the digital humanities project foregrounds the multiplicity of voices, experiences and stories in each participant who is part of the process of creating original work, as well as the evolution of the performance-in-the-making over time. Their construction of a digital curatorship echoes Fleishman’s assertion that Antigone (not quite/quiet) emerged from a ‘dramaturgy of encounter’, a process which privileges the interweaving of collaborative voices.

Disclosure statement

Mark Fleishman served as Guest Editor of the Special Issue, and as contributor. Veronica Baxter, as co-editor of the SATJ, managed the peer review process and co-wrote the introduction. In accordance with Taylor & Francis policy and our ethical obligations, we can confirm that there are no potential competing interests to report.