Editorial, 43.2

ABSTRACT

This editorial reflects on an intervention at this year's International Federation of Theatre Research conference by Ghanaian trans artist and activist Va-Bene Elikem K. Fiatsi (aka crazinisT artisT). I read this performance as an enactment of the entanglement of the current state-sanctioned and extra-legal campaign of homophobic and transphobic violence in Ghana in the necro-politics of our planetary poly-crisis. Theatre's capacity to capture and embody such sociomaterial entanglements runs through all of the articles in this open issue, which tackle subjects as various as rehearsal studies, flamenco performance, Beckett's deconstruction of identity, the politics of Victorian burlesque, militarised masculinity in contemporary Russia, camp robots, and labour struggles in recent Zimbabwean theatre.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics
• crisis
• trans

Looking back over the two years since the articles in this issue were published online, I am struck by the intensification of what is now commonly described as a poly-crisis of planetary scale. Ecological crises are erupting in the form of devastating floods in Mexico, Pakistan, central Europe, South Korea and Japan, as well as wildfires in Chile, Greece, Spain, Kazakhstan, and across north America. The island of Maui has just seen the deadliest fires to hit the US in more than a century (Dance 2023). Crisis events such as these and the earthquakes that hit southern Turkey and northern Syria in February of this year are all fuelling a global refugee crisis that continues to intensify, with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimating that 70% of the world’s displaced people come from the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries (Grandi 2021). More directly, many refugees are, of course, fleeing war. Since April, for example, the violent conflict that erupted in Sudan between the army and former government paramilitaries has reportedly created over a million refugees in nearby countries (Al Jazeera 2023). Elsewhere, entrenched state violence shows no sign of abating, with Israel launching an attack on the Jenin refugee camp in May that was larger than any military operation in the occupied West Bank since the Second Intifada (2000–2005) (Ibrahim 2023), and Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine having caused an estimated almost half a million casualties and rising (Cooper et al. 2023). The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also generated – in tandem with the coronavirus pandemic and environmental pressures – a global inflation crisis that has particularly affected the price of food. Here in the UK, food bank use is now considerably higher even than it was at the height of the coronavirus pandemic (Trussell Trust n.d..).

These interlocking crises of ecology, war and poverty constantly threaten to overwhelm the capacity of academic analysis, and often feel hopelessly distant from both the theatre and theatre studies, especially in the Global North. They were, however, brought vividly and theatrically to the attention of scholars attending of the annual International Federation of Theatre Research conference at the University of Ghana, Legon this July. The conference’s closing ceremony was interrupted at its start by an intervention from Ghanaian trans artist Va-Bene Elikem K. Fiatsi (also known as ‘crazinisT artisT’). In online documentation of this ‘guerilla performance’, Va-Bene gave it the title ‘Mis-sing Reality – The Beast Unleashed’, and described it as ‘an intervention to open new conversation on the “yet to be passed law” against LGBTQIA+ persons’ (Fiatsi and Elikem 2023). This was a reference to the so-called Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, drafted in August 2021 and due to be passed imminently into Ghanaian law. Reuters reports that the bill will ‘criminalize same-sex relations, being transgender and advocating LGBTQ rights’, with ‘jail sentences of up to 10 years’ as well as promoting conversion therapy (Adombila and Akorlie 2023). Wearing only a loincloth, which was smeared – as was her skin – with a mixture of clay and water, Va-Bene entered the back of the university’s Great Hall from one side at the start of the ceremony. Her long, red-dyed braids were loose down her back, and she carried a bowl of clay, which she had also smeared in a thick layer over her right eye and down her face. Her voice hovering at the edge of tears, Va-Bene sang a lament, which seems to be translated into English in the performance’s documentation: ‘We are speaking, we are crying, we are screaming, we are dying, yet no one hears us, only the spirits of our ancestors’ (Fiatsi and Elikem 2023). In front of the doors at the rear of the hall, Va-Bene turned to face the audience before very slowly and gradually walking backwards out of the hall and across two courtyards towards the exit, singing as she did, and then pushing the clay into her mouth to silence herself.¹

During this long exit, tense conversations could be seen between the university’s security guards, conference organisers and a group of attendees who chose to act as witnesses to the intervention, and in some cases to document it on their phones. Va-Bene paused at times, choosing – as it appeared to me – to hold her position as an anchor for these fraught exchanges about the right of this performance – and by extension its performer – to exist in this space: at the conference, on university property, and even in Ghana. There was, however, no question that Va-Bene was leaving, and leaving alone. Those of us who watched in solidarity could not accompany her or prevent her departure. As Giulia Casalini argues in a recent article on Va-Bene’s work, ‘crazinisT’s refusal of salvation … is her most extreme performance of queer African resistance and anti-colonial struggle’ (Casalini 2023, 108). In that context, the clay smeared across crazinisT’s face came to stand not only for the disfiguring brutality to which queer people are routinely subjected, and their exposure and silencing by the violence of the state, but for Va-Bene’s commitment to return to the earth. ‘I have to die for my activism,’ she has said, ‘if I die it will be on the street. I have to die doing art. I have to die fighting for humanity’ (quoted in Casalini 2023, 108). crazinisT artisT’s performances, in other words, reach far beyond the state-sanctioned and extra-legal campaign of homophobic and transphobic violence in Ghana that incites them, and into the necro-politics of our planetary crisis, which is condemning millions to displacement and ultimately to death.

This capacity of theatre to capture sociomaterial entanglements such as those drawn together in crazinisT’s performance operates and represent them in highly compressed forms that articulate them to wider structures of human experience runs through all of the articles in this issue. First, Carmen Pellegrinelli and Laura Lucia Parolin develop an approach to studying the sociomateriality of rehearsal that they term ‘Post-anthropocentric Rehearsal Studies’. Drawing on ideas from the ‘New Sociology of Art’, they demonstrate that the sociomateriality of rehearsal is a crucial dimension of theatre-making, and use the concept of ‘mediation’ to draw together its complex strands. In sum, they seek an approach that gives back to materials, bodies and matters in the rehearsal room their crucial role in the process of developing and refining a scene. They draw on ethnographic research to analyse specific activities in the rehearsal room to offer a less anthropocentric and a more nuanced account of the processes that contribute to the creation of a performance. Analysing the dynamics of entanglements in work practices of performance-making, they reveal the material base of processes that constitute the craft of theatre.

In a similarly ethnographic vein, Miriana Lausic’s article, ‘The pleasure in moving: drawing the space through flamenco bodies’, develops an analysis of flamenco performance and religious processions in Andalusia by deploying and extending Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of drawing. Lausic’s work is rooted in extensive fieldwork among the Roma community in southern Spain, and demonstrates how the Gitano body becomes a corpus of drawing, in Nancy’s sense, through a performance of tracing. This tracing involves both an originary intermingling of time and space and a structural overlapping of the animate and the inanimate. Far from being purely abstract, such tracing is considered as a choreographed self-portraiture of the Gitano community itself. Furthermore, Lausic argues that the performers and ethnographic researcher meet and intersect in a shared space of extension, so that the tracing of flamenco bodies parallels the performative dimension of auto-ethnographic writing. Like Lausic, Atėnė Mendelytė is concerned with the capacity of performance to express identity. Her analysis of Samuel Beckett’s That Time focuses, however, on the play’s exploration of the paradoxical and deconstructive nature of identity and selfhood, and its questioning of the ability of narrative to express and capture a preexistent, originary identity. That Time implies that identity is always constituted by the performance and narration of selfhood, throwing into questioning the hierarchy of the signifier and signified. Mendelytė therefore reads Beckett’s play in dialogue with Judith Butler’s notions of performativity, citationality, and subject formation, showing that Beckett’s play and its performance exemplify the ways in which narrative, to use Butler’s description, can deconstruct itself at the moment of its construction, and thus bespeak its own impossibility.

The next article, by Marta Villalba-Lázaro, takes us into a sphere of performance, Victorian classical burlesque, that has been widely dismissed as low culture, both for its insouciant treatment of classical mythology and its inability to raise serious social issues. Villalba-Lázaro’s article focuses on Robert Brough’s Medea, showing that, in fact, his burlesque performance constitutes a fascinating example of the handling of serious socio-political concerns in a popular cultural form. Rooted in Brough’s radical politics, the article reads his use of burlesque from a heterotopic perspective to analyse its critique of Victorian paradigms of class, gender and racial divisions and the strict social boundaries they reinforced. Brough’s burlesque, then, was a site not only of entertaining diversion, but of political contestation. James Rowson’s article likewise focuses on theatre’s capacity to challenge the social order, but in the context of contemporary Russia. Here, over the past 20 years, a group of theatre makers have staged works by suppressed and marginalised voices that have often been gathered under the idiom of New Drama (Novaya Drama). Whereas previous studies of this phenomenon have emphasised text and the dynamic use of contemporary language, Rowson provides an alternative approach by examining the work of Pavel Pryazhko. He analyses Pryazhko’s The Soldier (Soldat, 2011), in the context of the Second Chechen War and Vladimir Putin’s revivification of the military in the public sphere, contending that the production’s content and form constitute an oppositional discourse about the role of the military in contemporary Russian society. The performance’s rejection of traditional notions of theatrical language and dialogic interaction, in particular, both serves to disrupt the audience’s expectations of what a theatre performance is and opens a wider dialogue about the militarism and gendering of contemporary Russian culture.

Cole Remmen’s article turns our attention from the human body as a site of ideological reproduction and critique to the performance of near-human machines. Remmen charts a history of the performance mode he terms ‘robot camp’, which offers techniques for overcoming the potential for affective repulsion the relationship between humans and robots. He invokes both Edward Gordon Craig and Oriza Hirata, as well as Louise LePage’s reinterpretation of Judith Butler’s ‘performativity’, to offer a consideration of the robot as a performer. Remmen then reframes Steve Dixon’s ‘metallic camp’ in conversation with Masahiro Mori’s concept of the uncanny valley and Susan Sontag’s foundational ‘Notes on “Camp”’ to theorize the performance strategy of robot camp. He then traces this strategy across the history of performative robot portrayals, primarily evoking early twentieth-century automaton exhibitions and Elizabeth Meriwether’s contemporary science fiction play Heddatron. Thus, Remmen foregrounds how techniques of robot camp have been successfully employed to overcome affective uneasiness toward the robot and highlight how live theatre has shaped public engagements with and imaginings of the robot from its early origins.

Finally, Nkululeko Sibanda’s article examines the structuring of labour struggles from the precarious subject position of theatre workers, in the context of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 1999. Sibanda resists isolating these struggles within the occupational sector of the creative industries. Instead, she frames theatre practitioners as ‘art – workers’ and collectives such as the National Theatre Organisation (NTO) and Zimbabwe Association of Community Theatre groups (ZACT) as mobilising and organising agencies operating within the postcolonial Zimbabwean theatre industry. In that context, the NTO controlled and administered purpose-built theatres, provided funding and producing unity among its affiliates, whereas ZACT organised multi-racial Zimbabwean theatre groups into a collective, providing and mobilising financial and organisational support to create a ‘national theatre’ narrative. The article draws on resource mobilisation and rational choice theories to show that NTO and ZACT mobilized and coordinated their stakeholders towards addressing the precarious work conditions in the sector. Nonetheless, Sibanda argues that the precarious nature of theatre work; employer-employee non-distinction; the lack of knowledge of legal rights, and the fierce inter-and intra-organisational competition crucially complicated the process of re-mobilising and organising creatives in Zimbabwe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Thank you to Joe Parslow for illuminating conversations both about this intervention and queer activism more widely.