Towards an adaptive dramaturgy

abstract

When is the moment when women become written out of history? Is it at the moment of wifehood? At the moment of motherhood? Or is it the moment of daughterhood? Is it then that we are trained into servitude and rendered silent? Nira Yuval-Davis (1997:13) suggests that the relegation of women to private spaces, a common practice of patriarchal culture, silences women and excludes them from the process of nation building. I postulate that the gender gap in leadership, is a result of the erasure of women’s stories from the public archive. I contend that women’s leadership, in turn, cannot be achieved without accounting for women’s experiences.

As a theatre practitioner, I further contend that theatre and performance provide an opportunity to foreground women’s lived experiences in the public space. This inserts women’s voices and stories into the public archive as a process of delegitimating patriarchal narratives of nationhood that exclude women.

This article argues for adaptation as a strategy for challenging the canonical text and the ways in which it excludes certain voices by privileging others. Reflecting on my first attempt at adaptation, ‘Baleti’⁣ (Disele, 2019) I postulate adaptation as a form of performance-as-research. More specifically, I consider ‘Baleti’ an autoethnographic inquiry as I used adaptation to engage with the theme of waiting and how it might impact women’s leadership.

keywords:

• theatre adaptation
• feminist performance
• space
• voice
• storying

Notes

1 Oyeronke Oyewùmì, Lecture, Unisa Decoloniality Summer School, Pretoria, South Africa, January 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lebogang Disele

LEBOGANG DISELE is a PhD student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada and a Lecturer at the University of Botswana. Since 2016 she has focused on growing her company, The LC Performance Lab, through which she has produced four performances to date: Being (2016), Nkadzi (2017), In the Shadow of Blessings (2017) and The Thread that Binds (2018). Select performance credits include What (Black) Life Requires, at the 2018 Expanse Festival; Unwoven at the 2018 SkirtsAfire Festival, curated by Nasra Adem; Words Unzipped at the 2019 SkirtsAfire Festival, curated by Karimah Marshall and Belleville (2020) at the Bleviss Laboratory Theatre directed by Amanda Goldberg. Lebo has also dramaturged for David Kennedy (The Lower Depths, 2018) and Amanda Goldberg (Belleville, 2020). She is also part of the Azimuth Theatre’s workshop ensemble, ‘All that binds us’, which will be performed in September 2020. Lebo is a performer-researcher focused on interdisciplinary work that places the body at the centre as a process of exploring how oppression impacts and lives in the body. Her publications include ‘In conversation: Interrogating and shifting societal perceptions of women in Botswana through theatre’ in African Theatre 14: Contemporary Women; ‘Searching for a place: Identity and displacement at the Maitisong Festival’ in a special edition of Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies and ‘Towards sustainability in the theatre: a look at the Company@Maitisong’ in Botswana Notes and Records. Lebo’s PhD research focuses on how performance can be used to foster women's leadership by inserting women's experiences into the public archive. Email: [email protected]