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This book explores how South Africa is negotiating its past in and through various modes of performance in contemporary theatre, public events and memorial spaces. It analyses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a live event, as an archive, and in various theatrical engagements with it, asking throughout how the TRC has affected the definition of identity and memory in contemporary South Africa, including disavowed memories. Hutchison then considers how the SA-Mali Timbuktu Manuscript Project and the 2010 South African World Cup opening ceremony attempted to restage the nation in their own ways. She investigates how the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park embody issues related to memory in contemporary South Africa. She also analyses current renegotiations of popular repertoires, particularly songs and dances related to the Struggle, revivals of classic European and South African protest plays, new history plays and specific racial and ethnic histories and identities. "This book argues that memory functions as a key element in contemporary South African re-imagining of historical events and in constructing new definitions of national and personal identity. It compares two ways in which memory is embodied: in repertoires of practices, songs, dance, rituals, and in material archives, texts, documents, buildings. The particular contribution of this study is its focus on the role of performance in South Africa's renegotiation of memory and historical understanding, as exemplified in public events such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the South Africa-Mali Timbuktu Manuscript Project and the 2010 World Cup opening ceremony, and in memorial sites such as the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park. The book explores the implications of translating diverse embodied memories into a coherent, official national narrative that is usually defined and made coherent that is, over-simplified - by the state, which defines South Africa as a unitary 'rainbow nation'. The book compares official narratives that have tended to define how the 'new' South Africa is remembering the past to various theatrical engagements with memory that highlight specific disavowed themes which recur in post-apartheid South African theatre, which include exile, ghosts and hauntings, masculinity, and the tension between justice and reconciliation. The analyses extend beyond thematic accounts to include exploring the reasons for and effects of juxtaposing 'realist' and 'verbatim' aesthetics to more exaggerated, hyper-theatricalised forms. Ultimately this book argues for keeping archives and repertoires open to reinvestigation and reinterpretation, and in dialogue with one another." -- Back cover.

South African drama --- Collective memory --- Theater --- Dramatics --- Histrionics --- Professional theater --- Stage --- Theatre --- Performing arts --- Acting --- Actors --- Collective remembrance --- Common memory --- Cultural memory --- Emblematic memory --- Historical memory --- National memory --- Public memory --- Social memory --- Memory --- Social psychology --- Group identity --- National characteristics --- South African literature --- History and criticism. --- Political aspects --- Theatre Studies --- Republic Of South Africa --- PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / General --- Literary studies: plays & playwrights --- Mbeki. --- South Africa-Mali project. --- South African performance. --- Truth and Reconciliation Commission archive. --- cultural identities. --- cultural practitioners. --- memory. --- national identities. --- political crisis. --- post-apartheid South Africa. --- social structure. --- state sanctioned-performances. --- theatrical engagements. --- verbatim narratives.