The Aesthetics of Community Theatre and Gender Construction in Selected Post-Apartheid South African Dramas

Abstract

 Gender discourse has always played prominent roles in human society. In the last three decades, discourses on gender inequality have continued to offer different writing engagements to writers across the regions of Africa. The representation of gender disparity is one of the key issues generated in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. There have been various scholarly engagements across African Literature, but not much has foregrounded the relationship between gender and community theatre as reflected in the dramatic discourse of the Post-apartheid era in South Africa. The apartheid era resuscitated the urge towards the violence against women in the sense that the dehumanization of the male folks had effects on the treatment meted out to women in the homes and even on a larger sphere of existence. The Post-Apartheid era however attempted to re-establish the importance of the women by giving them a voice to authenticate their importance in the society. Generally, in African literature, gender inequality has also been on the forefront of literary discourse. While early male writers have not portrayed women in a seemingly good light, feminist critics have continued also to engage these misrepresentations of women in male authored texts. It is also in this light that female writers also have taken it up to address these patriarchal representations by depicting the women folk in a good light, in the face of socio-political and socio-economic woes bedeviling the African continent.

 A number of works have been done on the representation of gender (women, especially), generally in African literature. One of such socio-political cum economic issues is the apartheid regime in South African and its aftermath, tagged as Post-apartheid. The various theatrical experiments have culminated into a strong theatrical/dramatic tradition in South Africa.

The aesthetics of Community theatre and gender reconstruction were thoroughly reflected in the study in order to ascertain their reflection in Post-apartheid South African drama. The changing roles of gender participation in the South African Africa were also examined and analysed through the two selected texts for the study - Brett Bailey’s Ipi Zombi? and Thulani S. Mtshali’s Weemen. The two texts were analyzed through the lens of the Feminist-Womanist theory in order to explicate the aesthetics of gender representation in the two selected texts.

The findings of the study revealed that male authors of the post-apartheid era were trying to represent women in a positive dimension as a complement to the female authors who represented themselves and their struggles for acceptance and equality in their works. It was observed that male authors of the post-apartheid era portrayed women as objects of revolt against sexual fantasy that should be dealt with and as such, they are portrayed as victims of domestic violence, a theme reinforced through the use of language and dramatic techniques. The language and dramatic techniques also point in this direction.