The State of Research on Performance in Africa

Abstract

Performance raises fundamental issues about bodily praxis, human agency, temporality, and discursive knowledge and calls into question conventional understandings of tradition, repetition, mechanical reproduction, and ontological definitions of social order and reality. Across academic disciplines and across modes of production, however, performance is a contested concept, “meaning that its very existence is bound up in disagreement about what it is, and that disagreement over its essence is itself part of that essence” (Strine, Long, and HopKins, 1989: 183). In other words, performance has no precisely agreed upon definition. Rather it varies in scope and import from one academic discipline to another and from one practitioner, or human agent, to another. In the emerging field of performance studies, performance is open-ended, but it privileges process, the temporally or processually constructed nature of human realities, and the agency of knowledgeable performers who have embodied particular techniques and styles to accomplish it (M. Drewal, 1989b; Conquergood, 1989). In the broadest sense, performance is the praxis of everyday social life; indeed, it is the practical application of embodied skill and knowledge to the task of taking action. Performance is thus a fundamental dimension of culture as well as the production of knowledge about culture. It might include anything from individual agents' negotiations of everyday life, to the stories people tell each other, popular entertainments, political oratory, guerrilla warfare, to bounded events such as theater, ritual, festivals, parades, and more.

Frames of metacommunication in African theatre for development

“…There are close parallels between Drewal's (1991) notion of 'repetition with critical difference' and Sutton-Smith's (1997) of repetition as 'adaptive variability', which he also calls 'adaptive potentiation' or 'recapitulation'. In Drewal's (1991: 41) view, repetition allows a simultaneous signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity, enabling it to reflect both continuity and change.…”

Recasting Transnationalism through Performance

“…However, it did render me useful to the artists with whom I worked. This evokes Margaret Drewal's (1991) point that ethnographers should take up any role their research collaborators may need -such as photographer or cook -as part of their personal responsibility to the community. According to Drewal, this kind of involvement also productively implicates the researcher in the performance.…”

Tafisula ou la Mami Wata

“…Comme le remarque Margaret Drewal (1991), la représentation qui expose couramment par l'ironie, l'allégorie ou l'hyperbole les griefs de la population y sert de ferment de subversion et d'agent de conservation. Puisqu'ils n'étaient jamais fixés par l'écrit, les spectacles du Mwondo partageaient aussi avec la tradition orale l'art de contourner la censure politique, ce qui leur a longtemps permis d'échapper à la répres-sion du régime.…”