The Semiotics of Alternative Theatre in South Africa

The Semiotics of Alternative Theatre in South Africa Keyan G Tomaselli Although s t i l l regarded with considerable suspicion, the academic study of black South African theatre has recently become a respectable activity in some South African universities. This recognition, however, is tempered by a fear that classical 'civilizing' influences1 on humankind will be invaded and vitiated by an inevitable mixing of 'art with 'polities'. The more traditional approach which over-emphasises textual analysis comfortably confines the irreducible and protects i t from socio-historical and politicoeconomic investigation. Such influences are often argued to have nothing to do with theatre and are deliberately exorcised from the play. The result, we are told, is a richer, more acceptable contribution to 'culture! Any theatre which does not reproduce (albeit critically) the dominant social relations of society is considered vulgar and an insult to theatrical tradition which has become progressively divorced from the once f e r t i l e breeding ground of social experience itself (1). The naive attempts by so many critics and teachers of drama and theatre to study South African black theatre from the same esoteric and contextually remote tenets as they normally do Shakespeare, is matched only by their equally spurious efforts to tie up such a study with the purely tribal elements of black, society while ignoring the stupendous influences of apartheid which are primarily responsible for the images and expressions of both authentic and contrived 'black' theatre found in South Africa today. Because i t has been able to escape the bland homogenizing influences of capital which has appropriated 'art' in the name of a 'superior' white dominated civilization, authentic black theatre stands almost alone in its consistent achievements as a medium of popular working class expression. To understand this fully one must appreciate the relationship between art and ideology which reveals conclusions but not necessarily the mechanisms for arriving at those conclusions. Althusser (1971, p. 222), for example states, " . . . art makes us 'see' 'conclusions without premises', whereas knowledge makes us penetrate into the mechanisms which produces the 'conclusions' out of the 'premises'? In a different vein, Hacherey (1976, p. 6) argues, "To explain art objectively is to trace i t back to the reality which i t 'reflects' and to which i t 'conforms' in the way that an effect corresponds to i t s cause? This view of art is somewhat short-sighted, since art, particularly dramatic art, not only reflects reality but mediates that reality. This mediation will become clearer in our subsequent discussion of actor and audience participation of a play entitled Ilanqa Le So Phonela Abasebenzi. Tne cogency of art, therefore, lies in the degree to which i t exposes actual conditions of existence, the origins of those conditions, how they are conformed ideologically and what their social effects are. Working class theatre in South Africa is thriving and i s , in fact, nourished by the very social formation and ideology which suppresses so brutally the majority of people who live and work in South Africa. This type of theatre generally thrives in countries with social problems, and where there are marked class conflicts and political despotism. In such societies content is hardly a scarce resource: i t is endemic to the specific social formation. I t is there waiting to be discovered, given form and to be communicated to a participant audience who are themselves part of that content. This interaction with the actors is a cathartic experience which works to mitigate their lot in a performance which sees no separation or distinction between actor and spectator, stage and l i f e or performance and reality: they are all part of the whole, inter-twined in a metonyuric relationship which interconnects art with l i f e . This part-whole relationship is succinctly captured by Shakespeare's Jaques: All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players They have their exits and entrances And one man in his time plays many parts. This paper aims to build on previous work In this area (see Tomaselli, 1981a)referring to the genesis, development and consequences of various plays performed by the black working class in South Africa. Definitions and Paradigm I t is f i r s t necessary to reconsider the agglomerative definitions previously employed by scholars of what is normally termed 'black theatre'. The usual definitions account for neither cause nor consequence, content nor process, offering an inverted explanation of the social relations out of which1 that performance has originated. That is to say, the term 'black theatre is reductionist and derives mainly from the fact that most performers of this theatre happen to be black. To argue that such theatre deals mainly with black experience is fraught with difficulties since the causation of that experience tends to be ignored. Such a definition, by its very operational blandness, obfuscates the more cogent influences and deeper underlying processes consequent upon apartheid society which has brought about the label in the f i r s t place. The terminological division of theatre and drama in South Africa into 'black 1 , 'white', "Afrikaans' etc comfortably perpetuates the idea of dualisms in society on the sub-continent: the notion of a dual economy, and hence the structural oppositions of tribalism versus modernity, 'culture' versus naturalism, civilization versus savagery, Christianity versus paganism and politics versus art. In the absence of a more scientific term, most comnentators are guilty of imposing the label "black theatre" when analysing their dramatic subject matter, thereby suppressing theoretical anomalies which question the vulgarity of the term which, in its present form, carries l i t t l e thought of relationship, process or complexity of inter-actions between the economic base and ideological superstructure. Ian Steadman's Editorial has unravelled one layer of these difficulties in trying to reconceptualise these definitions and processes. What remains to be discovered, however, is a more generic term which acknowledges material origins, process and tranformation. Part of this needed clarification relates to the complex inter-relations which occur when black directors work with their white colleagues in creating a symbiotic theatreas-drama where the social class and experiences of each intercept and are encodad into the performance. Plays such as Egoli - City of Gold, The Island. Siszwe Banzi is Dead. The Last Han and Iianqa have all been assisted by the theatrical talents of white colleagues whose own experience can never duplicate that of their black co-directors, for class determinations and social relations are assigned by economic forces far more powerful than can be affected by the intentions of individual, even sympathetic, whites who perforce are part of the dominant ideology. This is not to deny the contribution of individual white directors to working class theatre or the effect on the quality of life of their actions. Such a modification occurs on an individual rather than on a structural basis. This observation will be enlarged later in a detailed discussion of {langa. I t is also necessary here to note the objections of the Frankfurt School, who would argue that: Great works are never cast in the partisan mold of a single class; they express the relationships of various classes within society as a whole, enabling their authors to rise above their class barriers . . . As a man, he belongs entirely to his class, whose ideology he shares completely, whereas as an artist or a writer who has become aware of the dialectic of his history, he brings to light the objective elements, the real dynamic forces underlying social evolution (Arvon, 1970, pp. 32-33). The relations between classes and their expression in a r t , however, are not as simple as Arvon implies, particuluarly in South Africa where skin colour is an added identification factor. Only a few black directors, for example, are able to breach the 'dialectic of (their) history 1 , and then only partially. Although by no means exhaustive, three different types of interclass contact can be identified in the South African situation. The first concerns those black director-authors who form part of the petty bourgeois class, and whose financial success, afforded them by their plays, tends to push them towards greater aspirations for class mobility. Where coopted by thesa pressures, they will become more entrenched in petty bourgeois values and, lubricated by financial gain, embrace a petty bourgeois lifestyle and ideology. The result is that such directors alienate themselves from the worker-actors with whom they have created the play unless, of course, they share his class aspirations. In any event, a growing r i f t will occur between the director and his proleterian audience who remain locked into the idea of a revolutionary struggle. He will thus lose touch with the grassroots working class ideology from which his plays originally derived their thrust. He will find i t increasingly difficult to identify with and articulate this working class ideology as the desire for material reward inevitably lifts him out of his working class background. The second case occurs where the petty bourgeois director-author, faced with the sane choice, decides to resist cooption by capital in the form of aspirations towards class mobility. Such an individual will find himself in a highly contradictory situation, for his class position, and i t s concomitant ideology pulls him in a certain direction, whereas his own conscious intellectual desire to articulate the working class position .and ideology pulls him in another. He will find no resolution to this contradiction other than trying to maintain an equilibrium between these two opposing forces. He cannot fully embrace proletarian ideology and l i f e style and at the same time he will not embrace petty bourgeois ideology and aspirations, although the latte r is the stronger and more natural tendency. This in-between position can only be maintained by dint of selfdiscipline and shows a much greater awareness than is implied by Arvon. The third case concerns the white petty bourgeois intellectual {in Gramsci's sense) who uses the advantages of his class position, most particularly his education, together with his understanding and simpatico of the working class to shape proletarian aspirations and provide them with a revolutionary thrust. This director-author has no direct experience of proletarian 16 lifestyle and i s , therefore, more firmly in the camp of the petty bourgeois than i s , for instance, the individual in the previous case. Under these conditions, identification with the working class is a self-imposed deliberate action which suggests a questioning of the ideology of his own class. This interaction between intellectuals and the working class functions to raise the consciousness of the masses. This point is illustrated by Gramsci's (1971, pp. 332-333) "philosophy of praxis" which . . . does not tend to leave the "simple1 in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather lead them to a higher conception of l i f e . I f i t affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and simple i t is notirtorder to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellect tual moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. The intervention by white directors in the practical activity of the active "man-in-the-mass" brings to that activity a theoretical consciousness which facilitates a greater understanding of the world in so far as this consciousness transforms perceptions of reality. This issue will be dealt with under the next section. What concerns us at this stage is the effect of this intervention on working class expression per se. In some cases, the participation of intellectual white co-directors has worked against the very earthy metonynic strengths of such theatre where they have sought to inject a modicum of theatrical convention into the play. In other cases, such plays have been brought about by whites who have introduced to actual working class migrant labourers the intellectual concepts of theatre and performance. Ilanga, for example, arose out of the frustrations of a trade union lawyer who devised a role playing exercise in order to facilitate successful conmunication with his clients who had been gaoled for an illegal strike, and who understood nothing of courtroom procedure, let alone the significance of corroborative evidence, accurate statements and the importance of witnessing the events in question (2). In this example, the play had its origins in black labour experience, but that experience was only externalised to a wider audience (eg. in a magistrate's court or a theatre) in performance, once the legal exercise had developed beyond i t s immediate purpose and was perceived by the lawyer to offer the germ of a possible participant theatre workshop. To label such theatre as "black" is to therefore oversimplify and ignore process and causation. This type of theatre is not unique to South Africa, although the specific dialect in which i t is seen, is. This paper then, rejects the reductionist concept of "black theatre" and will draw on the wider notion of "coramitted theatre" which functions to expose and reveal, in human terms, the consequences of ideology determined by a particular politico-economic and social conjuncture (3). Such theatre serves to reveal ideology froa the inside. To paraphrase Althusser, coantitted theatre would make us perceive (but not to know) in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which i t is held (Althusser, 1971, p. 223). This definition, while perhaps s t i l l too much imbued with the qualities of a noun, does, however, hint at a verb property as well: i t also implies process and involves a specific relationship to knowledge. 17 Theatre-as-Drana Just as the term "black" has been shown to be simplistic, so too, conventional notions of "theatre" and "drama" do not suffice in an explanation or even adequate description of performance expression in the Third World. Hilary Blecher (1980, p.35), for example, has described how goal-oriented theatre in the Winterveld, a vast squatter camp outside Pretoria, drew on the content of the squatters' lives and worked to sensitize these discarded and voiceless people to their situation and stimulate them to discover actions which could be potent in improving their qualities of lives. Here the director-cum-mentor helps shape and articulate what is inherent in the proletarian situation. The audience, actors and director are inter-changeable and act out their common frustrations. In Ilanga. for example, the actors (defendants), audience («agistrate) and director (lawyer) stand with a relative autonomy to one another in the courtroom. The devisor-lawyer, using dramatic form, helps his clients to articulate their positions and contradictions to a third party. In these terms, theatre is a mediation rather than a reflection. Through theatre in i t s widest sense, the fiftyfive black strikers were able to mediate their position to a magistrate. In a courtroom situation such as t h i s , or the Winterveld squatter camp, such performance can affect the individual lives of the actor-participants. Permutations of class determinants within this four tiered relationship are the devisor/author, the director, the actors and the audience. The permutations are wide depending on the class origins and class determinations of the various people fulfilling those roles. Such is the theatre of the Third World: i t has no need of the conventional tools of theatre - the proscenium arch, a stage, curtains, spot l i g h t s , a separation between the audience and performers, or even intervals: the props and technology of Third Horl d theatre compri se whatever is available at the time, from a passing cow, barking dog and traffic noise to the bleakness of a trade union hall or dimly l i t street corner. The players in the Moravian Hall in Soweto, for example, although in a building, interact with the noises of their environment and include them in their performances. I t seems ironical that South African universities have seen f i t to spend millions on building theatres which are equipped with everything which opens and shuts, but whicn have no capacity at a l l , except through the second hand and remote controlled mediations of technology to duplicate the ambience and dynamic flexibility and never to be repeated,constantly mutating forms of Third World theatre. At grass roots level, this theatre is technology free since i t does not require large inputs of capital in the form of equipment, financial guarantees and specialised venues. Without the concomitant constraints of having to amortise these outlays, this theatre is relatively free from the ideological constraints of commodity exchange and the need to attract a paying audience. This style of expression arises out of the raw material of life and the limited resources available to i t s creators. It is a theatre committed politically to the emancipation of a repressed, largely illiterate society. A corollary of i t s working class position in the South African social formation is that coonitted theatre grows, expands and is nurtured by the very fact that i t i s , by and large, oral in tradition, construction and rendition. Committed theatre, arising directly out of the very social experiences of everyday life, exemplifies a different origin to the more conventional Western theatre forms which move from a digital metaphorical textual mode to an anological mode when placed on stage (3). In committed theatre, this process is generally inverted and a part-whole metonymic relationship replaces the discrete sets of metaphor. The text-to-stage process becomes 18 irrelevant in an essentially oral tradition. The consequence is that i t is unlikely to be staged by a third partywho was not associated with its genesis or who does not have close ties with the director or performers. This dislocation is further emphasised by theatre architecture which removes the play from l i f e seeking an autonomy of signs, and locates i t on a stage where i t is performed and acted out digitally in isolation from the sociohistorical and environmental precedents which give i t its essence. In this way i t is removed from the material to the psychological realm. In committed theatre, the text is rarely recorded, but is nurtured in the mind of its creator and constantly updated and modified in terms of the lived re.lationship between people and their physical and social environments. This theatre is not wedded to the restricting conventions of dramatic heritage or the linear demands of alphabetic logic resulting from 500 years of print literacy. The dynamic material contradictions which produce the signs of reality are reproduce • d in performance in the form of conflicts which, unlike literature andmost dramatic texts, are not always resolved in an imaginary solution. Faced with the monolithic structures of apartheid, most committed theatre ends with a song of liberation. Such songs are usually addressed directly to the audience and are an indication of the helplessness of the working ' class in the face of the structural constraints of apartheid. As symbol, the song connects the performers and participant audience ( i f there is one) to working class emancipation whether this be articulated as a desire for better housing or political liberation. Thus, the study of committed theatre must include an investigation of process, of transformation, of the both/and sets of metonymy. Concern, therefore, is not with the word-bound digital on/off sets of metaphor encoded in a text, but rather with the concept of theatre-as-drama, analogical in mode involving continuous forms of mutating meaning, interacting with the dynamism and fleeting moments of real things, actual day to day experiences and props which may be available one minute but not the next (such as a dog barking). In theatre-as-drama, the world is a.stage, not only for the actors, but also for the audience. There is no separation, either architectural or metaphorical between the performers and the participant audience. Those conceptual barriers which do exist are part of the individual's response to what he/she is watching/ participating in and whether he/she interprets the performance in a metaphorical or metonymic sense. -Whatever interpretation results is largely determined by the class position of the viewer and whether or not he/she is part of the dominant ideology. Fot the working class black viewer of a committed play, like for example, Ego!i, the metonymical contiguity erodes not only the boundaries between art and l i f e , but also the distinction between performer and audience: he/she stands in metonymical relation to the experience he/she enacts. As Althusser (1971, p. 223) reminds us, artists do not give the viewer any knowledge of the world they describe. They only make us 'see', 'perceive' or 'feel' the reality of the ideology of that world. Ideology is the 'lived' experience1 of human existence and that is why the form in which we are 'made to see ideology i n , for example, theatre, has as its content the 'lived' experience of individuals. This 'lived' experience is not a given, given by the pure'reality', but the spontaneous 'lived experience' of ideology in its peculiar relationship to the real. In Ilanqa, for example, performers and actors are one and the same physically, psychologically, ideologically: there is not even a theoretical distinction between performance and acting and art and l i f e . By acting out what they had once actually experienced, or are continuing to experience, these performers introduced a symbolical level to what previously reposed in an iconical/indexical mode of signification (4). This deeper perception has implications for both actor and audience for i t helps both 'to see", 19 'to feel 1 and 'to perceive' a deeper structure of r e a l i t y . The average white spectator,- however, by virtue of his class position, is discontiguous with the experience enacted and his interpretation, governed by ideology, cements the boundary between art and l i f e and entrenches the d i s t i n c t i o n between performer and audience: the play stands in dyadic r e l a t i o n to something else and is thus metaphorically interpreted. For the director who imposes theatrical convention, performance is removed into the metaphorical realm. For the director who allows i t to develop organically, the play may be metonymic for both black and white audiences because they relate to the play as direct participants. That is to say, i t is metonymic for those white viewers who are forced to live the dominant ideology but who may reject i t intellectually. The interpretations through metonymy remain, however, d i s t i n c t , for the metonymy is operating at different levels of meaning. The white bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie can never experience true black working class relationships; and the black working class can never experience true white petty bourgeoisie experiences, but both act and react in response to the other's actions and reactions. Both are part of the performance f o r both live and are aware of the economic imperatives which have brought about these conditions of existence. The greater the understanding the greater the degree of perceived metonymy which permeates deeper levels beneath t h e ' surface of the" performance. The extent to which metonymy i s perceived, then, id dependent on the class position, the ideology and the politico-economic determinations of the spectator. Once performed in a conventional theatre, however, further complications arise, involving the commodity form of mass culture under monopoly capitalism. The Political Economy of Theatre of Conmittment In the Western world, the word,"theatre" normally represents a commodity exchange relationship where the success of a performance is judged on i t s box office returns or attendance figures. With this penetration of c a p i t a l , art is transformed into'a comnodity and is consequently robbed of i t s c r i t i c a l , negating role in relation to c a p i t a l i s t society. As a commodity, mass a r t is tied to the ideological purposes of capitalism. Its audience is one of passive consumers, spoon fed with 'entertainment' which reinforces the prevailing ideology. Consumption and leisure thereby mirror the alienated world of work under capitalist commodity production { 5 ) . In contrast to capitalist forms of theatrical a c t i v i t y which are t o t a l l y dependent on capital in i t s various guises, committed theatre-as-drama displays a resistance to being a commodity and is thus p a r t i a l l y free to operate outside the relations of the capitalist system. This freedom allows devisor-experiencers, such as the trade union lawyer, to maintain close links with popular culture and maintain an ideological accord sensitive to the forces of capital and aware of the methods by which i t delimits social relations. The degree of committedness is largely dependent on the degree of empathy which exists between the devisor and his subject. The further removed the devisor becomes from his subject, the less committed his work. This endistancing between the devisor and his subject can occur in a number of different ways. We have already discussed the effects of class mobility where the devisor's new found financial success l i f t s him out of working class consciousness. Another example concerns Ilanqa. where apartheid legislation reduced the metonymic component turning this expression from theatre into a 'play' where actor-worker participation was reduced and f i n a l l y eradicated. Once the actor-workers had been f i r e d from the iron ' foundry where they had worked, they were endorsed out of the area and 20 were forced to return to their homeland, Kwa Zulu. Some, however, continued in the play, their incomes being supplied by an entrance charge, while vacant roles were filled by black members of the amateur Junction Avenue Theatre Group. Once this process began, the intention of the play was diluted and a degree of institutionalization was introduced. Ilanga had run its courseand furthei performances became less empathetic. It is this concept of empathy which links the theoretical consciousness of the devisor with the practical activity of the workers. This implies that- the devisor does not need to have a similar class determinant as the experiencer-performers. While empathy can tendentially overcome class determination, the latter is, in the last instance, the over-riding factor. The source of this empathy might stem from many different origins. In IIanga, it is the result of lawyerclient interactions where the lawyer, who becomes devisor, is able to draw on the resources and freedoms of his class to generate a committed working class theatre which might not otherwise be aware of this communicative potential. Empathy thus lubricates a theatre which is located at the intersection of society, art and politics in a particular historical conjuncture. In such theatre, art and politics are no longer simply background issues, but crucial to the structure of the performance and its message. This is in contrast to more bourgeois forms of theatre, which through capitalism: inevitably alienates writers from popular life ... (an) alienation which leads modern writers to over-rate immediate causation, which they generally and inevitably see in terms of biographical-psychological causation, and so to acquire their preference for biographical form (Lukacs, 1976, p. 376). Very often individual writers or directors do not exist at all in Third World theatre. One play, Imfuduso. was generated by the women of the Crossroads squatter camp in Cape Town to communicate their misery and poverty to the wider community beyond their temporary geographical boundary marked by overcrowded-tin shanties and muddy potholed streets. This theatre was not scripted and has no identifiable, or for that matter, commercially saleable author. Such a collective authorship draws from common social experiences, minimizing the effect of personal biographical experiences. Imfuduso can be performed anywhere and, indeed, has been: in Crossroads itself, BBC 2 (6) and in the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. This translocation from the props of everyday life to the artificial props of a conventional theatre, where the space and the building itself stand for an escapist activity called 'entertainment', performance interpretations may be affected in terms of class origins of audiences which patronize that theatre. This remains true even in the case of 'fringe' theatre (such as The Market and The Space in Cape Town) where the dominance of capital is not so subtly sublimated. While not denying the contribution of The Market or The Space to the genesis of a South African theatre, it must, nevertheless, be acknowledged that the majority of their audiences, and certainly most of their funds, come from the moneyed bourgeois and petty bourgeoisie elements of South African society. There is, thus, an uneasy alliance between capital on the one hand, and committed theatre which makes use of these venues, on the other. This uneasyness is unambiguously reflected in the continued bewilderment of the press critics of white read and financed newspapers who tend to see an opposition1 1 between grubby politics and the esoterica of what VeVe Clark calls "thee-tah . That these productions are viewed at all is mainly a function of deference to capital which has allowed the performance of plays which would otherwise be ignored, as well as to the accessibility enjoyed by, for example, The Market Theatre's publicity department to the press. Plays which are 21 unable to draw on the resources of professional publicity agents are almost never reviewed even i f they are staged at these theatres. I t is not surprising, therefore, that white South Africans are unaware of a v i b r a n t , _ healthy and expanding dramatic a c t i v i t y going on in the smoky, po luted back streets of black townships and squatter camps. I t is thus e n t i r e l y predictable that the last to know of these a c t i v i t i e s are the c r i t i c s , and students of drama and theatre. Our reliance on Western forms of interpretation and the bland acceptance of a set of prerequisites which shape the way we define theatre has led to over-emphasis on "the most manageable or most concrete of the elements of theatre, namely the text and author" (Hauptfleisch, 1980, p. 15) Hauptfleisch, although offering no reasons for this imbalance, shows, for example, that 43.3% of research in the theatre arts in South Africa f a l l s into the categories of "Playwright Analysis" and "Text Analysis . Less than 0 5% has dealt with the p o l i t i c a l or socio-cultural aspects. Clearly, this pattern of research in the more privileged i n s t i t u t i o n s of this country is a direct reflection of how forms of theatre are i d e n t i f i e d . I t follows then that a significant proportion of theatre which actually exists is simply not seen by white South Africa because, ideologically, i t is only interpreted as theatre once i t is located in a building labelled by the noun, theatre . This very anonymity confers upon committed theatre an autonomy and a rare o r i g i n a l i t y . Because i t is ideologically i n v i s i b l e , i t often escapes the ravages of censorship and other restrictive laws which govern freedom of expression in South Africa. Recordings of the media can be censored; where a text is available or a performance accessible concrete evidence can be produced in court. In contrast, ideas cannot be restricted and court evidence of something reposing in the oral tradition and which changes daily is d i f f i c u l t to pin down legally. Censorship thrives where a r t is a commodity but is more d i f f i c u l t to apply where theatrical expression resists the penetration of capital. This is not to say that black actors and directors are able to totally escape state intimidation. Those who use conventional places of performance such as administration, church and school halls and conventional theatres are more easily identifiable and many have experienced intimidation of one form or another. Further restrictions on out of doors gatherings enforced by, for example, the Riotous Assemblies Act etc push performances further underground. Repressive state pressure, however, i s often counter productive for i t further strengthens the metonymic relation between actor and audience. The actor cannot escape the consequences of his actions and the audience are reminded of the consequences ot t h e i r actions being recreated by the actor. Having outlined the p o l i t i c a l economy of committed theatre-as-drama, we may now turn to a specific instance which w i l l take the form of an interview with Hal ton Cheadle, one of the devisors of the play Tianoa Le So Phone! a Apasebenzi. Background to the Event Fifty five black workers, the majority of whom were migrant workers from Kwa Zulu, belonged to the Metal and Allied Workers Union. The company, an iron foundry , resisted recognizing the union or the union shopstewards of the foundry . This dispute between the union and the company took the form of several meetings between the two, and f i n a l l y erupted in a s t r i k e . The workers were arrested for striking i l l e g a l l y . In preparing t h e i r defence, the meetings and the strike were reconstructed in order to get proper statements from the accused strikers. During this reconstruction, the workers did not merely re-state what was said, but started assuming roles. The idea of the play arose out of t h i s . The Junction Avenue Theatre group assisted in in setting up a theatre workshop with some of the s t r i k e r s . The play grew 22 from this workshop. The plot closely followed the events of the foundary the worker actors strongly resisted any attempt on the part of the devisor to alter the course of events. The specific cause of the strike was the unfair dismissal of a union member. The workers stopped work and called a meeting with management. The management addressed the workers but interpreted the meeting as a strike. They immediately called in officials of the Department of Labour and the police. The fifty five workers were arrested and taken to the Boksburg Police Station. On disembarkation they were taken singly from the police van and assaulted by six policemen. The Union instructed their lawyers to apply for bail and defend the workers. Criminal charges were laid against the police, and action has been instituted against the Minister of Police for damages. The following day the arrested workers appeared in court. They were still dressed in their work clothes - leather aprons, goggles etc. Bail was finally granted at R80 apiece, which the union paid. The legal case was prepared. The defence was that the stoppage was not a strike, but a meeting. Such meetings had taken place during working hours before. It therefore became important to reconstruct those meetings in order to take a consistent statement. The lawyer, Halton Cheadle, comments: I found it absolutely impossible to take statements. Each of the 55 arrested workers had a different version of what took place. They all saw things differently. Some remembered one incident only, others ten different incidents. I was unable to cross check. So I decided to follow a different tack. I set up a role play and cast one of the workers as the manager. The manager would come in and no sooner than he opened his mouth, one of the 'worker s 1 said: "No, he didn't say that. Remember he said this ..." And what happened was that they collectively reconstructed the incident. I had a tape recorder and once it was agreed that the re-enactment was accurate I would record it. We would then find out who replied to management and what he said. No sooner had they got into the spirit of things, than the worker who was acting the manager really started acting the part. This manager has some really unfortunate habits like pulling up his trousers with his wrists. The black actor-worker mimicked this and everyone just collapsed laughing. At one stage during the re-enactment one of the worker s got up and shouted at the 'manager! In response one old man said to the fellow shouting, "It's no1 good saying that now. You didn't say it then. It's too late now'. Humbled, the younger worker sat down. So it was actually quite cathartic in a way. They had three meetings before the strike. Each was re-enacted in . this way. We also re-enacted the strike itself. They acted out the dancing and what actually happened when the Department of Labour arrived and tried to speak to the workers. I didn't realise what they had done. No-one had told me of this incident in their statement. Then we acted out the strike because I wanted to know what the Department of Labour has said and how the workers had responded. It transpired in the re-enactment tfiat they did not refuse to work, and that they were going to go back to work. The police arrested 23 them before they could do so. All these things have legal significance but i t gives some idea of how the play arose. In a sense i t was them j u s t acting out their own experience. I t was a very effective way for me to take a statement. Ilanga: Drama-as-Theatre Armed with a transcription of the role plays, Cheadle approached Ari Sitas of the Junction Avenue Theatre Group and together they established a theatre workshop with some of the dismissed foundry workers. Cheadle provides the contextual details: To give you an idea of who these labourers were: they were migrant workers; they were i l l i t e r a t e and one of them said that he had never seen a play in his l i f e . Later he recalled that he had i n deed seen one, but this turned out to be a slide show which was given by (sociologist) Eddie Webster during the s t r i k e . Eddie had slides of the machines in the foundry and a movie of foundaries in the United States. 'That was his f i r s t play'. He mixed up slides, f i l m and theatre. He had never been to any form of what we might call Western entertainment, and yet he acted absolutely amazingly. He was probably the best actor of a l l , and the keenest. He actually insisted in getting a job here on the East Rand so that he could participate in this sort of workshop. He had never even seen a black play. Black plays are very much township and middle class black entertainment. These guys were hostel dwellers. They were i l l i t e r a t e . In the workshop we acted out some of the meetings. One of these meetings involved a black petty bourgeois representative from the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation (SEIFSA) who was a called in by the employers - a total sellout or "impimpi". These foundry workers are rough men, tough and hard working. This s e l l out comes in with tight pants, wearing dark glasses in his hair St Tropez style and spoke to them about being brothers together. Their dislike and hatred of him was obvious. We took that incident and one of the actors from Junction-Avenue was a"ble to characterise him. He came in and spoke through the side of his mouth. The foundry workers were amazed, "That's him", they said. And then we would say, "Now don't just stick to the t r u t h " - this was one of the great problems we had. The workers responded, "No, i t didn't happen like that". We t r i e d to get them to move more freely - not what they did do but what they would l i k e to do i f theeventwas repeated, or what they would like to have said now that they had thought about i t . I t was very d i f f i c u l t f o r them to move from describing to giving free rein to t h e i r imagination. This resistance was a very useful corrective on us. We constantly attempted to imagine an expanded situation. They were absolutely insistent in their descriptions. They would change the structure of the play which we had worked out because they said i t wasn't correct. With bad consequences a r t i s t i c a l l y , but i t worked. We did a whole series of l i t t l e incidents. We t r i e d describing hostel l i f e : "What time do you go to bed?" "Do you sleep at night?" "What time do you wake up?" "Tell us exactly what you do then". I t was a l l done i n Zulu. So we taped the situations, transcribed them and had them translated. And so we just carried on doing incidents. 24 And one day we thought, let's go, let's do it - and we did the strike play. We structured it as follows: we had a clock machine. One of the issues which came out in the description of foundary life was the absolute hatred of the clock machine. The clock machine is on a wall. The workers have to insert a card into the machine and it clicks in his time of arrival. From this card the number of hours worked is measured. If the worker arrives late, this device clocks him in as being late. The worker gets fired 1 if he clocks somebody else's card in. It is control through 'time . It's a major issue for these workers. It s symbolic significance is real. I can talk of time in an abstract sense a different concept to real time. The clock machine clocks away through the whole play. We structured the play together, myself, Ari and five workers. One of the workers was basically fatalistic. He would go and clock the machine and smack it as hard as he could. He tells stories of how terrible life is, how if he came in early the clock machine gives him no extra money, but if he conies in late it takes money away. He describes how miserable it is living in a hostel, never seeing his wife and children. He offers a long monologue: how early he had to get up in the morning; how long it took him to get into work,'We spend hours in the bus. We live far away. They push us as far away as possible. We are like a disease we live so far away". He describes the journey to work and how everybody in white houses are still asleep. "And then it takes the manager ten minutes to get to work. It takes us two hours". While he is giving his monologue he is also changing into his work clothes. He is recreating people coming to work. Then the next worker comes through. He is the 'joller'. He comes in and clocks the machine and listens to the monologue. He comments, "The" problem is that you are not prepared to 'duck and dive'. If you come in late you get someone else to clock your card. You1 don't have to stay in the hostel, you can stay in the 'kitchen '.' Those are the structured conversations - we structured them and the workers were to ad lib them in performance. But then what happened was that a completely free and unstructured interchange occurred. We had a real kind of tension occurring between the 'joller' and the fatalist. Q: Would this change in terms of the experiences of the day? Yes. They knew roughly what was expected of them. The experiences were so real, it was like a real life experience. Q: To what extent was the script modified in terms of various daily experiences? We structured various positions. The third worker would come on. He was the union representative (It is a totally didactic and propagandist play). He would say, "You have given up and are just ducking and diving. The real answer to our problem is a collective struggle". Then just as these conversations terminate a bell goes, a siren. And the guys rush to work. So we recreated the situation with the foreman shouting "Start work". We structure exactly what is going to happen next. There is no ad libbing in this regard. We assigned specific roles. Once the role and structure have been agreed upon, then the actual script is open, and it does develop. There is no doubt about it. If something does not work the first time they will try something else the next night. There are certain lines which are actually set out and which come up every time. The hostel monologue, for example, is always the same. Q: How does working in a union hall differ from working in a theatre? Part of the problem on a stage is that you don't get the sense of the activity. The idea is to make the audience a part of the play. Originally we had the petty bourgeois SEIFSA representative come on and face the workers. We changed that around. Now he speaks to the whole audience and the workers on the 'stage' went and sat in the front row. The crucial thing was to get the audience to participate in rejecting this sellout. Two of the actors would be sitting in the audience. They never go on stage but sit in different places in the hall and would heckle and shout. They would be seen as part of the audience. Well, in fact, the response was absolutely spontaneous. You don't even need those actors because the audience just boos the shit out of anyone who is a baddie. The moment the SEIFSA rep came on he was booed down. He tries to speak to the audience, saying, "My black brothers I come from SEIFSA, an employers' organization. My name is Msibi..." One of the audience actor's then responds, "Can I ask you a question, Mr 'Thebehali'?" (7). "My name's not Thebehali it's Msibi" would be the retort. And then what happens is that the audience all shout out their "impimpi's" (sellouts') names which causes endless hilarity. And then we began to find out all the in-jokes amongst the workers and the union committee. And the petty bourgeois representative keeps on denying that these are his name, "I'm one of you", he pleads. Then we had the Dept of Labour enter. This actually happened at the foundry. He tried to persuade the workers not to form a union which he called "foreign ideology", but instead to have a liason committee. We don't know exactly what he said so we re-created something else where he says, "Oust in Bantu custom..." He goes on: "Workers lose their heads with all that talk about unions, tell them" he orders the Boss Boy. "It's a problem of communication. If you translate properly, then there will be no problem. OK. Tell them that industry looks a bit like Bantu society. The manager is their father. And do they talk to their father directly in Bantu society?" And everybody heckles and ask, "Who are the children? Do you think we are boys?" "Noi Out of the question" continues the official. "They talk to their mother who talks to their father who talks to the mother to talk to them. So, they don't talk to the father directly. So, they don't talk to management directly. So they talk to their mother. And who is the mother of all the black workers in South Africa? The Dept of Labour". The workers then tell the Boss Boy to say, "They want to know if the manager sleeps with the Dept of Labour". At this stage the audience usually goes berserk - an incredible uproar. The official then says, "You have got it all wrong. What I am trying to say is that the union is not their mother. The union is a union. The Dept of Labour is like their mother. Most incidents were drawn from their experience at the foundry. Others were introduced to create humour. One scene involves an accident and a notorious company doctor. The injured worker goes into the sick bay. The doctor comes in and puts his stethescope against the wall and declares the worker 'fit for work 1 . That sort of incident goes down pretty well - the 'doctor' , the 'supervisor' and the 'nduna' and the real worker 'villains'. 26 Then we act out the dismissal scene. That couldn't be changed at all. The workers insisted that it be re-enacted exactly as it took place. There is the arrest, the strike and finally they pack their bags and leave. As they leave they scream at the audience. This again brings in the idea about the audience being part and parcel of the workforce. They accuse the audience of taking their jobs, "You clap and laugh and enjoy our story but no sooner are we chucked out of our jobs than you take our jobs". That leaves the stage for the final propaganda line: one of the audience actors gets up and says "Look brothers, it's wrong to accuse us ... What we need is unity. We will never get anything unless we have unity. If we have unity they will understand... Q: In what other ways do you include the audience? The audience is really the body of workers - it represents the workers at the meetings and the workers at the end of the play. When the play begins the actors go in with the audience and sit all over the place. Only the front row is empty because we want the front row to be used by the actors when they are addressed by the SEIFSA representative. After the first two actors have entered the acting space a bell goes and the three remaining actors roar in across the chairs recreating the sort of hustle and bustle of getting to work on time and being screamed at for being late. Take the strike, for example. The manager tells the workers that they have ten minutes to sign an agreement. "Either you go back to work or you go". Then the actors turn to the audience and ask their advice. If the audience cries for strike action then the actors argue against going on strike explaining all the difficulties. We are just trying to get the audience to think about the consequences of their decision. If the audience says "don't go on strike", then the actors say they must go on strike. If the debate is really good and everybody is participating we will let the argument develop for up to half an hour - but we will stop it at some stage. Then the audience is asked-to vote for or against. If the audience votes for the strike the actors say that they will listen. If against, then the actors say they are going against the audience the audience decision. That is the end of the performance. The point is that we could never do that to a white audience because they would probably be opposed to striking and wouldn't even think of such action. In contrast, . workers are always discussing whether they should strike, where and when etc. Q. Were you aware of any police intimidation or surveillance? No. No-one knows about it. Ours is a small venture. Once you have got a union you have got protection. We get our audience through membership. When we performed for the 1981 History Workshop on the Wits campus we allowed in a more general audience. Q: How did the change of venue from a union hall to a more conventional theatre on the Wits campus affect performance? Let's take the case of half-time, interval I suppose. We would get the audience to sing a FOSATU sosg and march into the acting area area. This is on the same level as the audience. They march on and and push the manager back, the white foundry employer. So the 27 I t is really hell of exciting, Q: What happened to the legal case and the accused strikers? We lost i t . Q: They each got six month suspended sentences. Do you s t i l l use this technique of role playing in taking statements? I always use i t now. We have got a case against the Minister of Police for R64 000 for assaulting the foundry workers. I t was very hard to find out what happened. The police took them out of the van one by one, assaulted them and put them in a c e l l . The workers said that they heard the beatings but did not see any of the beatings. But when we re-created the scene I could show them how they must have been able to witness the assaults. I t was amazing how the whole pattern of evidence arose. I asked one of the defendents wherehehadstoodin the truck. He was was next to the airvent, and looking throught i t he saw number 1, number 7 and number 9 being assaulted. He did not understand what I had wanted. Another example, when one of the workers was escorted to a cell he was assaulted at the door. "Was the door shut", I asked. "No, i t was open". "Who was in the cell?" "yes we all were". "Didn't you see him getting hit?" "Yes we a l l did". They obviously did not understand what I had been asking for previously. Then everyone put in their evidence that they saw the assault. Then they saw the blood in his eye and the bi t of his ear which was chopped o f f , oh God, a l l that sort of s t u f f came up. The Socio-Semiotic of Performance The theatre-as-drama (as in Ilanqa) stimulated by the experiences of Hal ton Cheadle as an attorney in a capital-labour c o n f l i c t becomes the theatre of committment once the actors (in both the sociological and dramatic senses) decide to perform for an audience drawn from a wider set of social experiences. In Ilanga. i n i t i a l l y at least, that audience comprised the working class who attended such plays in union halls. Once the play was taken out of this organic environment and translocated in a more conventional theatre such as The Nunnary on the Wits University campus, the spontaneous metonymic component is replaced with a much more controlled metaphorical text-to-stage performance t r i p l e division. The audience is unable to relate to the play as i t was originally performed in a union or church h a l l . The distinction between audience and performers is both architectural and one of class. Techniques which worked in a hall do not always work in a more conventional environment. Where an actor addresses the audience and involves them in a decision whether to strike or not enhances the metonyraic contiguity in a hall populated by a participant audience; in a theatre such a technique becomes crudely propagandist!'c and devoid of subtlety. The architecture and composition of audience have caused a change in the meaning of the signs involved. Where symbolism operated in the spontaneous performance in a hall involving a participant audience, in a theatre f i l l e d with a more remote audience (in terms of class) only the f i r s t two t i e r s of signification - icon and index - are activated. The analogical probity of metonymy which connects audience and actors to l i f e , degenerates i n t o the digital sets of metaphor where the performance is seen in terms of relations of likeness which are discontiguous to l i f e and operate on a purely indexical level. Interpretant production, the generation of the 28 first part of the play is movement up to power and the second part is down. Q: So the interval is actually brought into the performance? Yes. The actors and audience would have their cokes inside. They don't go anywhere. There are no curtains to close. The actors have no make up - they have nothing to worry about. They all participate, drinking coke in the way workers would have tea time. A siren would go , indicating tea time. Q: The audience would immediately know it was interval or tea time? Yes. They would know because it is an audience composed of workers. They know exactly what a siren means. It would be tea time in the play and interval for the audience. Then the siren would go again for the end of tea time and the play would start itself quite naturally and the audience would take some time to find their seats. The actors would have a big piece of metal and they would act out working singing a work song. So we would have at least three or four minutes while the audience was seating itself. To answer your question, it would not work like this with a white audience so at the History Workshop where the majority of the audience was white we simply ran the play right through without an interval. It's a hell of a loose play. The design of the Wits venue effectively separates the audience from the play. The whole thing about a union or church hall is its flat floor, so everything is on one level. Q: How did having migrant workers as actors affect the play? Although the play worked the workshop did not survive because, as migrant workers, they were not allowed to remain in the area for more than 72 hours after they were dismissed. If it wasn't for Junction Avenue and their black actors who substituted the play might not have gotten off the ground. Q: How did these more experienced actors carry the idea through? Has the play lost any of its original spontaneity? No, the spontaneity is still there. Some of the original actors are still available and the Junction Avenue actors maintained a sense of spontaneity. Ari and I are thinking of setting up a workers theatre in Springs, but this time with workers who have Section 10(1) (a) (b) and (c) residence qualifications. They are not shift workers either. They are permanently in Springs. It's bloody hard to get a workshop off the ground because of these problems. In Springs, there are also women available, which is not the case with migrant workers. Q: How do you, a white intellectual, see your role within this kind of worker theatre? I am not at all embarrassed about being intellectual and the workers are not embarrassed either. The fortn it takes would be our intervention. The substance is theirs. It is an on-going relationship. 29 idea to which the individual signs give r i s e , is curtailed and the original essence of the performance is v i t i a t e d , i f not lost completely. The idea or interpretants associated with the sign "theatre" by the average theatre-going audience w i l l differ from the idea e l i c i t e d in a black worker who participates in the performance in a union h a l l . Once the play is removed to a theatre environment, i t w i l l have an appeal to a different kind of audience, one that can afford high admission prices, feels comfortable in a multi-racial environment, and one which is generally conditioned to a view of theatre as something to do with the development of intellectual l i f e but something divorced from the l i f e of social experience. This type of audience,which has nothing in common with the social experiences of the worker-actors, may be unable to f u l l y comprehend a play l i k e Iianga or Egoli for they are unable to relate to the values, motivations and causations which brought about the play in the f i r s t place. This occurs despite the fact that the audience i t s e l f is part of the dominant ideology to which the play is a reaction. The function of the performance as an information and awareness processing centre providing a group therapy which spreads outwards from the small group of performers to the wider society w i l l not, and indeed, cannot be shared by an audience drawn from another, more dominant class which sees l i f e , the world and i t s myriad relationships from the confines of i t s own opaque ideology. This audience, which does not even share an i n tellectual empathy with the performers, w i l l t r y to dyadically separate out 'theatre' from the surface of reality to make sense of a play which contradicts their own perceptions of South African conditions of existence. Metaphorical distinctions replace metonymic part-whole contiguities. The siren wailing for half-time (tea time), for example, is interpreted as simply a substitute for interval which is usually signalled by the closing of curtains and the switching on of house l i g h t s . Instead of tea time (interval) forming part of the audience-actor performance, operating in an anological mode, i t is seen more conventionally as a digital device to give the audience a chance to go outside and smoke a cigarette or imbibe some refreshment. Such interactions between the audience and the performers where the two are drawn from different classes is uncomfortable at least, and t o t a l l y noncommunicative at worst. This kind of open-endedness which, in union hall performances, t o t a l l y involves the audience who are consulted, sworn a t , who vote on strike issues, who identify their sellouts etc could not work with an audience not party to the social experiences of the actor-workers. These observations must, of course, raise the question of the permanency of such theatre and whether i t should be staged for audiences other than those drawn from the same class as the actor-workers. The dramatic changes which are required to make the play sensible to non-worker audiences have a d e f i nate diletarious effect on structure,performance and response. To commit the play to a text would simply be to record i t for historical purposes. I t would be almost impossible to re-enact that text at a different time, a different place in a different society and maintain a similar relation to i t s new non-participant audience. Plays l i k e Iianga, Egoli.arid Imbumba arise and die in relation to the ebb and flow of worker experience in t h e i r need to expose new areas of social i n j u s t i c e , sensitise workers to a l t e r native means of emancipation, and to maintain a level of consciousness which may otherwise be suppressed under state legislation and repression. Such worker theatre proceeds within a cycle. To try to resurrect them under alien circumstances w i l l ultimately destroy their purpose and force this theatre into the very worla of theatrical convention and commodity exchange i t is trying to overcome. Under these conditions, what started out as theatre, becomes a play, a text and is consequently sucked into 30 bourgeois interpretations where biographical and psychological influences predominate in subsequent enactments. With this transformation the role of intellectual, as Gramsci would describe him, is equally vitiated as this capitalist intellectual is unable to understand the ideological significance of form or substance. There is no lack of subject matter from which worker theatre can draw. Hal ton Cheadle has raised the issue of pension funds, for example: Black workers are being coopted into the total strategy through management who are trying to compel workers to belong to pension funds. This raises the issue of where pension funds invest their capital. They invest i t in government stocks. The irony of i t all is that workers are providing a form of capital accumulation at the expense of their exploitation. Worker theatre must, therefore, be conceptualised as alternative theatre for i t strongly resists a content determined by capital, that is subject to the interests of capital and that is controlled by capital. The semiotic components - use of signs, production of interpretants and their relation to the interpreter all stand in opposition to bourgeois forms of theatre. Conclusion This paper set out to reconceptualise the paradigm of "black theatre" and has shown this term to be ideologically loaded. All so called black theatre is a product of its social environment, from the stereotyped rhythms of Ipi Tombi and Meropa to the harshimages of Eqoli and Ilanga. The former 'trTDaV renditions reinforce the prevailing ideology, while the latter try to expose i t from the inside. Each of these performances is encoded with signs which mean different things to people of different classes, social experiences and ideology. To therefore study text alone is to miss these shifts in how the sign is used and how i t is interpreted by audiences drawn from different classes. We have replaced the term "black" with the notion of "committed" theatre giving a particular form of expression a specificity which sets i t apart from the bland and agglomerafive bourgeois definitions of 'drama' and 'theatre 1 . This definitional turmoil has been brought about not only by reconceptualization of the notion of ideology over the last ten years, but also through the discipline of semiotics which sees all forms of human activity in terms of performance. Reality is always experienced through the mediating structures of language and is an active process through which the real is made. Reality, therefore, may be seen as a complex system of signs and perception of meanings of those signs is ideologically determined. All actions, whether on a stage or anywhere else, are encoded with signs and this definition of performance goes beyond metaphor where the world is like or stands for a stage, but rather uses the metonymic device of stating that the world is a stage. This allows us to expand considerably the definition of 'theatre' to include the expression of everyday events such as the actions of iron foundry workers, miners or prison farm labourers. The performers in these plays are both actors and actants, dramatists and characters; their roles are inter-changeable, signifier and signified become one: the characters play themselves and enact their lives before the audience. They create and are created and stand in metonymic relation to the experience they are re-creating. Van Zyl states this relation succinctly: "The act of performance is the act of creation is the act of criticism. The part stands for the whole," is part of the whole and u l t i mately is the whole" (Van Zyl, 1977, pp. 47-48). 31 Alternative theatre is working class theatre and has taken 'theatre' back to i t s roots; i t has rediscovered the origins of theatrical heritage; i t s very crudity has reintegrated theatre with l i f e : the stage has s l i d into every aspect of working class existence and through metonymy has become identical with the 'lived' relationships of human existence. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Ruth Tomaselli and Halton Cheadle f o r commenting on various drafts of this paper. .Notes 1. See, eg, Steadraan, I . 1980: "Critical Responses to Contemporary South African Theatre" Critical Arts. Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 40-46. 2. For a detailed analysis of transformation see Tomaselli, K.G. 1981: "Ilanga Le So Phoneia Abasebenzi: An Example of the Devolution of Theatre From the Laser to the Candle". South African Labour B u l l e t i n . Vol. 6 , No. 7 (forthcoming). For a textual review see Molepo, M.M. 1981, Vol. 6, No. 6, pp. 49-51. 3. Digital communication is concerned with discrete elements. I t deals with choice, with either/or sets rather than both/and sets of metonymy. Analogic communication does not deal with breaks in meaning such as either/or sets, but rather with varying pitches, quantities, densities or rhythms. For further information see van Z y l , J.A.F. and Tomaselli (eds.) 1977: Media and Change. McGraw-Hill, Johannesburg 4. Here i am using the Peirceian triadic relative of icon, index and symbol. For further information see Tomaselli, K.G. 1980: "Semiotics and Semiology - Their Implications for A r t " . South African National Gallery Bulletin, No. 2, pp. 1-5. 5. This point is discussed at length by Lovell, T. 1980: Aesthetics, Politics and Pleasure. BFI, London 6. Exerpts from Infuduso were broadcast on BBC 2 in 14th February 1981. The program was entitled "Arena, I Talk about me - I am Africa. 7. This is a reference to the government appointed Mayer of Soweto who i s regarded as a sellout by the people of Soweto. Pictures of Reality: References Althusser, L. 1971: Lenin and Philosophy. Arvon, H. 1970: Marxist Aesthetics,• NLB, London Cornell University Press, London Blecher, H. 1980: "Goal Oriented Theatre in the Winterveld". Vol. 1, No. 3, pp.23-39. Gramsci, A. 1971: Selections From Prison Notebooks. London. Lawrence and Wishart, Hauptfleisch, T. 1980: "Theatre Research in South Africa". Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 11-22. 32 Critical Arts. Critical Arts. " Loveii, T. 1980: BFI, London Pictures of Reality: Lukacs, G. 1976: The Historical Novel. Mitchel, S. Harmondsworth, Middlesex. Macherey, P. 1976: Aesthetics, Politics and Pleasure. Translated by Mitchel, H and "The Problem of Reflection". Substance, 15, pp. 6-20. Molepo, M.M. 1981: "Ilanga Le So Phonela Abasebenzi". Labour B u l l e t i n , Vol. 6, No. 6, pp. 49-51. South African Steadman, I . 1980: "Critical Responses to Contemporary Theatre". Arts, Vol. 1 , No. 3, pp. 40-46. Tomaselli, K.G. 1981a: "Black Theatre: Africa, Vol. 8, No. 1 , pp. 51-58. Text and Context". Critical. English in Toraaselli, K.G. 1981: Ilanga Le So Phonela Abasebenzi: An Example of the Devolution of Theatre From the Laser to the Candle". South African Labour B u l l e t i n , Vol. 6, No. 7 (Forthcoming). Van Z y l , J.A.F. 1977: "The Socio-Semiology of Performance" in van Z y l , J.A. F. and Tomaselli, K.G. (eds.): Media and Change. McGraw-Hill, Johannesburg, pp. 36-48. AFRICA OTbsoribeto AERIOA PERSPECTIVE, a quarterly journal, started in 1974, attempts to raise the level of discussion »n African, particularly Southern African events, through articles that are both theoretical and factual, hath historical and current. Seme of these have been about resettlement,woman,state and labour,underdevelopment,industrial conflict, the role of the reserves in. S.A.,local political bodies,and the growth ef capitalist agriculture. African countries which have been leaked at Mozambique,Uganda,Tanzania,Angola,Namibia,and Zaire.Issues planned will focus en the social consequences of the use of machinery in S.A. industry,and on the Southern African states. LOCAI SUBSCRIPSIOHS-H3.8O FOR 4 ISSTJBS.POSTAGE INCT, OAIiL MONDAYS 9-l.OOjm, 7 SOUTH COURT, 40 JORRISQN ST. PERSPECTIVE L WRITE TO:PO BOX 3 2 2 8 7 , BRAAMFONTEIH, JOHANNESBURG, 2 0 1 7 . 33