Auto-ethnography as Performance Practice in an African Context: Negotiating gender and cutlure through performance practice - Softcover

Lejowa, Jessica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 384438958X ISBN 13: 9783844389586

Publisher: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2011

Synopsis

Shifting Uncerstandings of Performance Practice in an African Context By critically analysing three pieces of devised performance, Even as I Walk (2008), They Were Silent (2009) and The Wages of Sin (2009), I argue that the concept of performance is not easily defined. Rather, it is an ever-changing phenomenon, which can become a useful platform for dialoguing about deeply personal and necessarily public and political subject matter. I locate myself and the theatre makers I worked with to create the three pieces, in the work by reflecting on and writing about the processes using auto-ethnography as a lens. The context within which I write, and within which my collaborators and I work, is that of our locations in very specific African, moral, cultural, political and creative impulses which we interrogate through the creative processes. Through the writing and reflecting, I arrive at various conclusions, including what I call ‘the methodology of not knowing,’ the importance of the group in facilitating the research and creative process, the necessity of redefining or renegotiation—for the purposes of both the research and the creative goals—our understandings of what performance is.

About this title

About the Author

Lejowa holds a Master of Arts in Dramatic Art from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is a lecturer, director, facilitator and performer. She continues to investigate ritual in theatre and power dynamics in gender, race and religion, with a particular focus on the lived experiences of women in Africa.

Edition details

• Publisher: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 384438958X
• ISBN 13: 9783844389586
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92