ABSTRACT
Introduction Theatre has often played an important role in protest and dissent, not only in South Africa but also in countries such as Morocco (Jay 2012), Nigeria (Binebai 2013), Kenya, and Mauritius (see esp. Banham 2004). It is thus not surprising that anthropologists have recognized the potential for performance, and theatre in particular, to act as a catalyst for social and cultural change (see e.g., Beeman 2011; Schechner 1985; Turner 1988), create new forms of political identity and community (Kondo 1997: 22), and even transform consciousness itself (Schechner 1985: 4). Many argue that performance always changes us in some way and that no one is left unaffected (Beeman 2011: 3), a fact that makes the study of performance important to a discipline that examines the constant morphing and shifting of cultures. Given the amount of anthropological scholarship that speaks to the transformative power of performance through theatre, it seems that anthropology as a discipline is well-suited to engage the intersections of protest and culture through theatre-to study, among other things, the ways that theatrical forms of protest are shot-through with the particularities of culture and the ways in which culture itself is transformed and shaped through artistic interventions. Even so, anthropologists rarely specify exactly how performance leads to tangible forms of social, political, or personal transformation, and often fail to explain how these processes of transformation can be studied empirically. At times, anthropologists have looked to audience reception to find how a performance might have been transformative. But performances are short-lived and ephemeral events that are often forgotten by audiences soon after they depart the theatre or performance space. Other times, the transformative potential of a piece of theatre is sought in the work itself, whether in the structure of a performance or its rhetorical content. The result of either approach is rarely an empirically derived account of theatre’s transformative affects. The power and efficacy of performance, whether for protest or more general forms of activism, are often asserted but rarely substantiated in an adequate way. What is needed is a methodological approach that avoids many of the problems common in studies of theatre. Rather than focusing on questions of
audience reception, an approach that emphasizes artists themselves can generate much more data as to how theatre can play a role in any kind of tangible change or transformation. While audiences typically attend one performance of a particular work, the artists who create a performance do much more than simply present it to an audience. They also rehearse, hold production meetings, and often celebrate the opening and closing nights of a show, among other activities. Even if some of these activities do not take place, a theatrical performance is the culmination of a much broader set of processes that are often ignored by anthropologists and others. Attention to these more ordinary and everyday contexts that surround a performance can be key to an empirical study of the transformative power of theatre. After laying out some typical approaches taken toward the study of audience reception and some useful interventions that have been made by anthropologists and others working in similar fields, I go on to discuss two sets of problems that seem to plague empirically driven studies of theatre. One problem is conceptual and the other methodological, and both of these sets of problems make attention to audiences problematic. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of a group of theatre activists from Soweto (the Khulumani Forum Theatre Group), I argue for an approach that can work around these problems. The approach advocated here has a scope that is broader than previous studies, but ultimately can lead to a more empirically grounded analysis of the ways in which theatre can function as a catalyst for social and political change.
