Useful websites

All Africa : a multi-media content service provider and the largest electronic distributor of African news and information worldwide. Registered in Mauritius, with offices in Johannesburg, Dakar, Lagos and Washington, D.C.

Africa Beyond : A new website working to celebrate and promote African Arts and Culture in the UK. The website's initial focus is on Ghana's impact on the arts scene, tying in with celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the country's independence. Of particular interest to consortium members might be the article on African Theatre in the UK in 2007, especially since the consortium gets a mention! Africa beyond is also hosting the Word From Africa Festival in London in June (see Festivals below).

Africa Museum : research institute and museum in Belgium

Africa Network : a non-profit consortium of American arts colleges with a mission to develop and enhance a lasting presence for Africa in the academic programmes and campus life of the US's liberal arts institutions.

Africa Within : an online portal to African and African-American history, with a wide range of information and pictures on everything from up-to-date news feeds from Africa to recipes and an events calendar.

Africalia: an initiative created by the Belgian Development Co-operation in 2000 and based in Brussels. It aims to promote sustainable human development through supporting the arts and contemporary African artistic expressions. Africalia supports and associates itself with artistic projects, initiated in Africa and focused particularly on sub-Saharan Africa, in multiple disciplines from performing to visual arts.

African Image Alliance : an arts orgnisation whose main mission is to work towards a more positive portrayal of Africa, Africans and African culture in the diaspora, seeking to enhance the general public's understanding of Africa's diverse culture, heritage and contemporary society through public programmes, services, consultation advice, and visual arts and performance events.

African Synergy : an African-based cultural network that facilitates the building of workable partnerships between artists, arts venues and creative and literary enterprises throughout Africa to enhance intra-Africa cultural exchange. Has also launched the African Tour Circuit to stimulate movement of artists within Africa and to support African artists touring and performing within the continent.

African Theater USA : website detailing African theatre, drama and entertainment in the USA

African Theatre Association : Based at Goldsmiths University in London, this association has a membership of academics and practitioners interested in African theatre practices, holds an annual symposium (see the Events page) and publishes a bi-annual journal, the African Performance Review.

AfriCan Theatre Ensemble : The AfriCan Theatre Ensemble (ATE) is a not-for-profit theatre organization based in Canada with charitable status whose mission is to make African theatre accessible to the public through performances of old and new creations, workshops and staged productions of plays originating from or inspired by Africa.

Afridigital : publishers of a fortnightly e-letter called African Broadcast, Film & Convergence specialising in African media news - television, film, radio and internet.

Afromix : The Portal of African and Caribbean Cultures - news, music, arts and culture, society, travel.

Art Moves Africa : a mobility fund for artists and cultural operators within the African continent which aims to facilitate cultural and artistic exchanges within Africa. Art Moves Africa offers travel funds to artists, arts professionals and cultural operators living and working in Africa to travel within the African continent in order to engage in the exchange of information, the enhancement of skills, the development of informal networks and the pursuit of cooperation.

The Association of Dance of the African Diaspora, ADAD: A UK-based organisation which works to facilitate the development of a strong infrastructure for dance of the African Diaspora in Britain and whose vision is to see Dance of the African Diaspora move from the margins to the mainstream.

British Council : helps bring the best of UK performing arts to the rest of the world

decibel : performing arts showcase featuring work by England-based performing artists and companies of African, Asian and Caribbean descent.

Funders Online : a search engine to help grant seekers find the appropriate organisations to apply to

Imagine Africa : a campaign organised by the Strømme Foundation in Norway in partnership with the Goree Institute located on Goree Island in Dakar, Senegal. The campaign is based on the ARTerial Network and aims to constitute a global initiative for promoting and strengthening African arts and reasoning.

Itzcaribbean. com  The online resource for the Caribbean community and Caribbean culture in the UK, business and services directory, articles and information. View over 3,000 pages of information relating to all things Caribbean in London and around the UK.

The Immigrants' Theatre Project : A US-based theatre company that presents traditional and experimental plays by and about immigrants to the US and worldwide. Includes a useful calendar of relevant plays currently in rep or on tour in the States.

In Place of War: Based at Manchester University, In Place of War is a project exploring the relationship between performance and war and is particularly concerned with initiatives such as theatre in refugee camps, in war-affected villages, in towns under curfew, and in cities under attack. The project aims to research, link, debate and develop the practice of performance in sites of conflict, bringing together theatre makers and scholars who practice performance in place of war. The project has visited Sudan, Rwanda and Ghana and has commissioned 12 Congolese musicians to perform as part of the Exodus Theatre Season in Manchester in December 2007.

Independent Theatre Council (ITC) : The UK's leading management association for the performing arts, representing over 650 organisations across the country. ITC runs training courses in a wide range of areas, including Widening Your Audience & Marketing, Effective Fundraising, and Touring Abroad.

Kadmus Arts : A free website connecting to almost every dance, music and theatre festival in the world. Hold your cursor over the area you're interested in on the map of the world on the home page, and it will show you information on festivals in each country, as well as providing links through to festivals' own websites.

Live Art Development Agency: The Live Art Development Agency offers Resources, Professional Development Initiatives and Projects which specialises in publications and artefacts related to groundbreaking and risk-taking contemporary art practices.for the support and development of Live Art practices and critical discourses in the UK and internationally. The Agency works strategically, in partnership, and in consultation with artists and organisations in the cultural sector. Unbound is the agency's online booksho, which specialises in publications and artefacts related to groundbreaking and risk-taking contemporary art practices.

MultiArts Projects & Productions - MAPP : US-based performing arts company that produces and tours music, dance and theatre productions worldwide, with great experience of working with African and African diasporic performing arts. Manages The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium in the US.

The Observatory of Cultural Policies in Africa: OCPA, the Observatory of Cultural Policies in Africa, is an independent pan-African non-governmental organisation aiming to enhance the development of national cultural policies in the region and their integration in human development strategies through advocacy and promoting information exchange, research, capacity building and cooperation at the regional and international level.

The Performing Arts Network of South Africa (PANSA) : PANSA is a national network of individuals, NGO's, service providers and mainstream institutions that are engaged in the practice or support of the performing arts in South Africa (all forms of dance, music, opera, musical theatre and theatre).

The Power Of Culture: The Power of Culture is a website about culture and development. It offers a list of projects, initiatives and objectives of Dutch organisations active in this area. The site also reports on the part played by cultural organisations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and South-east Europe and points the way to other internet sources, media and organisations.

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) : Part of the University of London, SOAS is the world's leading centre for the study of a diverse range of subjects concerned with Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Theatre Managements of South Africa (TMSA): contact details for production companies, theatres and their managements in South Africa

Tribal Soul Arts : Based in Birmingham, Tribal Soul Arts create story and art inspired by the traditional performance, visual aesthetics and contemporary cultures of Africa, producing multi-disciplinary work and facilitating workshops and education programmes.

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) : details of all UNESCO's educational and cultural programmes in each African country.

Visiting Arts : A core delivery partner of the Africa Consortium UK, Visiting Arts is an organisation dedicated to strengthening intercultural understanding through the arts. Website provides information on funding programmes, case studies, and international work coming to the UK.

Young Arab Theatre Fund (YATF) : an international organization designed to serve independent young artists living and working in the Arab World, including Arabic Africa. The long term goal of YATF is to encourage the sustainability of the independent artistic scene in the Arab World and to nurture and sustain its development. YATF supports young artists living and working in the Arab speaking countries in realizing their artistic projects. YATF announces three fixed deadlines for funding applications per year, on the 1st of January, 1st of May and 1st of Sept.

2009/2010 Festivals

A big thank you to our colleagues at MAPP and The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium in the US for much of the above information on African festivals around the world.

Agendas

AGENDAS I, National Theatre, 23rd March 2007

John Kani on South African Theatre Design

As special guest speaker at this event, held by Wimbledon College of Art in association with UK Arts International, John Kani spoke in conversation with Jane Collins, Reader in Theatre at Wimbledon College of Art. Ms Collins began by asking Dr Kani to think back to the concept of ‘design’ in theatre during apartheid in South Africa, the process of which Kani described as a ‘salvage operation’, with a ‘hit-and-run’ approach brought about by necessity.

Kani spoke about the need to disappear immediately after their illegal performances in the townships; the quicker any signs of a play could vanish, the better, and this became a crucial factor in the design of their productions.

Because there were no theatres built in black areas in South Africa, the concept of space became fascinating to theatre practitioners. Because the ‘stage’ and ‘set’ as such were always ‘designed’, indeed dictated, by the community space available to them, the focal point of the productions was always the actor, leading to an intrinsic emphasis on communication between the actor and audience.

Kani recounted the amusing story of a production of Titus Andronicus, starring Anthony Sher and directed by Greg Doran, on tour to South Africa. A group of black miners from out of town were in the audience one night, taken by their well-meaning master who liked to ‘educate’ his workers by introducing them to classical culture. As is the township tradition, after the performance the miners waited for the cast to emerge, ready to discuss and argue about the play with them. However, the actors disappeared off home. Seeing the group, John Kani knew that they were waiting to speak to someone about the production so he went and spoke with them. ‘It was very good’, they said, ‘but why did the actors pretend we weren’t here?’ Interaction between actors and audience – the breaking down of the so-called fourth wall – remains crucial to South African theatre; indeed, it is this interaction which gives practitioners ‘a mandate when we create theatre’.

John Kani went on to speak about Ruphin Coudyzer, an excellent South African theatre photographer, whose photos of the Market Theatre Johannesburg’s 30 years of productions were on show at the National. Coudyzer is a photographer who very much sees himself as part of the creative team: he wants to engage with the actors and the creative process when taking his production shots.

Theatre design in modern South Africa, Kani said, is like a language: ‘we have to use it as we need it, in the way we feel it would serve us best, so it becomes a tool we use to communicate what we feel is the agenda’. It was critical, Kani maintained, that design comes very early in the reading and rehearsal process, not as an afterthought to the creative process.

Kani went on to consider the change in approaches to design which the end of apartheid and the chance for South Africans to engage with the international theatre community had brought about. There is now a risk of modern designers finding unusable basic spaces which Kani and his fellow practitioners regularly used in the days of apartheid theatre. Because simple spaces, such as community halls in the townships, are not furnished with all the new design toys people now know are available, there is the risk that they are being condemned as useless, when once they served adequately and sparked creativity and communication. It is a risky trend that artists are becoming less significant while technology is in the ascendancy.

In response to a question from the floor as to how much the global market and international theatre industry was affecting theatre being made in South Africa, Kani commented on how for the first time, South Africa wants to measure itself against its colleagues on the world stage. Yes there are now international influences on South African theatre, but South African practitioners should not adapt their work specifically so it is suitable to or easily understood by the world stage. Foreign audiences have to be given the opportunity to see into South African life through its theatre; South Africa’s theatre should not be adapted or tampered with for the foreign audiences it is now able to reach. Young creatives are in danger sometimes of looking out into the world and considering what future international life there might be for a piece before they have even written the play! As a result, they can be drawn into simply creating clones of previous great South African work which they know to have been successful internationally, in the hope of emulating this international success themselves. Original creativity of integrity should always be the paramount creative force, Kani felt, and while at one level, the exporting of South African theatre could be said to have adversely affected the quality of work being produced, on another level it has exposed South African artists to other cultures and influences, which in turn can be of great benefit to them.

Kani concluded by pointing out the irony that in post-apartheid South Africa, he felt that there was now almost more reluctance on the part of producers to put on black South Africa theatre than previously. So keen is the South African theatre industry to move on from apartheid and to embrace the wide range of productions it can now bring into its theatres, that it is keen to feed the craving from audiences to see work they weren’t able to see under apartheid. There is a perception among some audiences that black South African theatre will only ever be apartheid protest theatre, full of politics, and they would prefer to see the spectacle of the Bolshoi ballet or Disney’s Lion King instead.

AGENDAS II, Festival Theatre Edinburgh, 22nd August 2007

Brett Bailey on The Use of Myth, Tradition and Ritual.

Special Guest Speaker: Brett Bailey, Director, Third World Bunfight
In conversation with Alicia Adams, Kennedy Center, Washington
Hosted and introduced by Jane Collins on behalf of Wimbledon College of Art, Visiting Arts and the Africa Consortium UK
This event was supported with funding from two of our core partners: Wimbledon College of Art and Visiting Arts and we are very grateful to them for their support. Approximately 80 delegates attended.

Jane Collins introduced both speakers and welcomed everyone on behalf of the Africa Consortium UK, explaining the role Wimbledon College of Art was playing in its partnership with the consortium by hosting this series of discussions around contemporary artistic practice in African performing arts.

Alicia Adams echoed Jane’s welcome; it was lovely to see so many people at the event and a pleasure to be in conversation with Brett Bailey. Below is an edited summary of their conversation.

Alicia Adams (AA): Some of the many things that have been said about you, Brett, include the following: “He is the enfant terrible of the new South Africa”, “His work is brilliant, grotesque, magical, ritual theatre”. Given all that has been said about you, what do you think your work says and what does that say about you?

Brett Bailey (BB): I wrote that all myself…! South Africa is the most first world African country but it is still a landscape of extraordinary poverty, with a huge legacy of colonialism. There has been a huge influx of other African nationalities since liberalisation in 1997, which has led to South Africa becoming a melting pot of cultures. The name of my company, Third World Bunfight, came to me once when I was sitting in a taxi in the traffic, seeing huge billboards around me advertising huge multinational corporations, but right alongside them there were market sellers, goats, rubbish, throngs of people, a huge melée of cultures, colliding in a bunfight struggling to exist. South Africa often seems to be a collision of belief systems, with extraordinary things always vying for attention. My work is about challenging the hegemony of Western European structures and forms as the most valid forms of art.

AA: Why do you choose to draw on rituals and myth in your work?

BB: Many years ago I spent a year travelling in India, living in rural communities, trying to ‘find myself’ spiritually. And then I realised one day, why am I searching for spirituality in India when I’m fourth generation African? I then came home and had no money, and spent three months living in a Xhosa village in the rural Transkaai, trying to investigate Xhosa history and understand the tribe’s rituals and ceremonies. By incorporating references to this in my work I have often been accused of appropriating black mythology and stories. For me, I was simply investigating and I didn’t understand that viewpoint. Now, I do, and I now tend to concentrate on setting ancient classical myths in an African context.

AA: Third World Bunfight has been in existence for ten years now. Can you take us through the history of your work?

BB: My early works were: Ipi Zombie, about the surivivors of a car crash; IMumbo Jumbo, a story about the collision of Western and Xhosa cultures; The Prophet, another Xhosa story about a community who killed all their cattle in order to exorcise themselves from what they saw as the infiltration of white culture, but who therefore brought famine and starvation upon themselves; and Big Dada, the story of Idi Amin, genocide with flare.

AA: Why is the play called IMumbo Jumbo?

BB: It reflects the absurdity in all the stories.

AA: And why the House of the Holy Afro title?

BB: I went to a nightclub to check out what they were all about because I’d been commissioned by a European festival to make a piece for a nightclub and I didn’t really know about them – I’m not a nightclub man. So, it’s just a bubblegum show with a bubblegum title.

AA: You are a serious director who really cares about the work that you do, I think. At least, I think you’re serious. Are you serious or are you just spoofing us? Do you think you’re serious?

BB: Yes, I’m serious. In the spoofing I’m serious. A serious, spoofy artist…

AA: How would you characterise your work?

BB: A visual, musical craziness which is the country I come from and which is why I’d never want to live here or in Europe: the flavours there (in South Africa) are so rich. So much that was once dominated and destroyed is now going to re-grow from this beautiful, fractured culture. And also, my work has an aesthetic that tends towards the camp…!

AA: You say that you want your actors not just to perform the work you create but to inhabit it. What’s the process you use to help them to inhabit your work?

BB: I’ve worked with lots of performers over the years with spark. How do I enable them to inhabit the work? Well, with Orfeus, we would start with a 15 minute meditation each morning. We also all went and lived in the mountains above Cape Town to do our improvisations in the water, to live in the landscape, to live the scenes on the mountains, around the boulders, and pull that experience into the performers’ bodies and into their characters.

AA: What is the language of South African theatre today?

BB: it’s the language of artists like Paul Grootboom. It is a language which is as valid as the American language. Some beautiful forms have washed up on our shores over time from the West, but they can’t be the be all and end all any more.

AA: Well, you are certainly opening the theatre world in South Africa to extraordinary, investigative, interrogative debate. And perhaps we’d better open that debate up to the floor now. Any questions?

Shango Baku, actor in Splendid Mummer: People like John Matshikiza have not attained as much acclaim as you have. How do you feel about the fact that you are doing something that has been done for ages, you are touching on the exotic? Have you thought that these very myths like Orfeus may have started in an African context and been appropriated by the ancient Greeks and ancient Western cultures?

BB: Yes, I am very aware of this debate, but I also have a rather arrogant view that as an artist I shouldn’t censor myself at all. I should go where fools fear to tread and blunder around and let critics trample all over it all. I often quote Pallo Jordan, the minister for arts and culture in South Africa, who says that he doesn’t want people to be making opera in South Africa because it’s a Eurocentric art form. But isn’t soccer also a Eurocentric art form…?

Question from the floor: Why are you using stories like Macbeth for your work? Doesn’t Africa have its own stories and myths?

BB: Sure, but the thing about myths is that they’re universal.

Question from the floor: What was it like for the black South African actors dealing with issues like witchcraft and zombies when they worked in your plays? What techniques did they use to handle these issues because they’re very sensitive, very taboo and I would feel very uncomfortable myself? And secondly, what do the white South African audiences think of you?

BB: With Ipi Zombie, I took the cast to Grahamstown to interview people about the real crash and the zombies and we worked the script together out of these interviews. Yes, it was quite hard for them and it is a taboo. We then translated the show into Xhosa and toured it in village squares and universities and schools in the Transkaai. As for your second question, yes, most of my audience in Cape Town is white, although there is increasingly an emerging black middle class who do go to the theatre too.

Leslie Lewis Sword, actor, Miracle in Rwanda: I loved House of the Holy Afro; I love bubblegum. House of the Holy Afro opens with a soundscape that sounds like it is recorded music but then you gradually realise that it is live. Why did you decide to do that?

BB: The opening of House of the Holy Afro really stills people. I wanted it to be meditative, seductive: I like to soften people, then slap them, then soften them, then slap them.

Question from the floor: Are there any more stories that South Africa has to tell?

BB: Thousands. Some that I wouldn’t tell. I wouldn’t tell the Truth in Translation story [a production at Edinburgh Fringe 2007 by Colonnades Theatre Lab with music by Hugh Masekela]. A young black playwright speaking from inside of his culture is much better qualified than me to tell some of these stories.

AA: I’d like to finish by asking you, what’s next?

BB: I want to break Macbeth up a bit; I want to wound him a bit, not too much! I’m also writing an opera about the story of people who leave Senegal on boats. The Dialogue- Wroclaw International Festival in Poland had a theme recently for one of its festivals: what does it mean to be European? And you know, out of 23 works, all of them were by white artists, only one of whom was a woman. Again, we still have European identity being defined by white men, and this is something that needs shaking up.

Jane Collins then thanked everyone for coming, and especially thanked Brett Bailey and Alicia Adams for speaking so interestingly.

AGENDAS III, Theatre Royal Stratford East, 10th June 2009

Lebo Mashile on contemporary performace in South Africa.
In conversation with Mojisola Adebayo, Artist.