ABSTRACT
In writing on orality and performance in contemporary Aboriginal drama, I am immediately faced with at least two limitations. First, through my privileged position as a white literary critic, the task partially re-inscribes indigenous voices at the same time as it attempts to mobilize the oral text as a mode of decolonization. Second, since this drama has proliferated within a context of commercial theatre, literacy, and access to a print culture, it is always already marked with the traces of wr iting and European theatr ical conventions. Furthermore, my examination of specific plays frequently relies on a text which is not the oral performance but a written transcription of what it might be (or, in some cases, an approximation of what it was in the first production). In a sense, then, I am always dealing with simulacra, and the difficulty of delineating a moment of enunciation for the text increases when you consider that many of the plays to be examined were developed through workshopping processes involving non-Aboriginal actors, directors, writers, technicians. The notion of authorship thus becomes even more complex than in other narrative genres, as does the concept of text, especially given the potential variance of each enactment of a play. That the performance text is difficult to define and radically unstable, however, need not be as problematic as it appears. Within a post-colonial framework that promotes ‘hybridization’ and ‘literary contamination’1 as weapons of cultural transformation, delimiting notions of an authentic indigenous voice becomes a far less useful task than examining how the multiplicity of Aboriginal voices might be deployed. This essay, then, is not so much concerned with developing an oral poetics/ aesthetics as with outlining the strategic possibilities of performance for the textual production and consumption of oral discourse as cultural expression.
