Recasting Transnationalism Through Performance

Theatre Festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique and Brazil

C. McMahon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137006806
• eBook ISBN: 9781137006813
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

A rigorous ethnography of three international theatre festivals spanning the Portuguese-speaking world, this book examines the potential for African theatre artists to generate meaningful cultural and postcolonial dialogues in festival venues despite the challenges posed by a global arts market.

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Introduction – Global Casting Calls: Performing (Trans)National Identity on Festival Circuits

In September 1999, as a young, fresh-out-of-college Peace Corps volunteer, I sat in the auditorium of the Mindelo Cultural Center on São Vicente Island in Cape Verde, West Africa, eagerly awaiting the first performance of that year’s Mindelact International Theatre Festival. My intellectual curiosity about Cape Verde’s theatre festival was ignited on my first visit to the island, and five years later I began academic research on the topic. In 1997, the Mindelact festival had billed itself as the link between the Cape Verde Islands and theatre in the wider Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) world. Over the years that followed, its main-stage program highlighted theatre from Cape Verde, Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé, and Mozambique, among other countries. Mindelact was staging a burgeoning Lusophone transnationalism.

This was a reality I could not escape during my first glimpse of the festival in 1999. Just days before the festival started, the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, which had been recolonized by Indonesia in 1975, became a bloody battlefield. After the majority of Timorese subjects voted for independence from Indonesia, Indonesian troops and paramilitary groups retaliated with bellicose tactics that left over 1,000 East Timorese dead. Artists at Mindelact 1999 took the suffering of East Timor to heart, since the struggling nation was a fellow member of the Lusophone international community. On the opening night of the festival, a Cape Verdean theatre group began its performance by unfolding a large banner requesting a moment of silence for East Timor. The next night a Lisbon-based Angolan theatre group made the same request of its audience, and a Portuguese troupe later dedicated its production to East Timor. The festival director, João Branco, who is Portuguese, wore a traditional Timorese scarf for the duration of Mindelact, chronicled the impact of the crisis on festival participants for a local newspaper (Branco 1999), and noted the significance of the fact that the final day of Mindelact coincided with the day an international peacekeeping force finally left for East Timor (Horizonte 1999). At that festival, Lusophone theatre artists used embodied performance and strategic silences to invoke Lusophone solidarity.

Beyond its transnational implications, Mindelact 1999 also illustrated how an international theatre festival can host a heated debate about a country’s emerging national identity. The opening production that year was Tabanca Tradiçon (Tabanca Tradition), staged by the visiting Cape Verdean troupe Ramonda. It was a fairly straightforward reenactment of Tabanca, an elaborate Afro-Christian street festival that is celebrated each year on the group’s home island, Santiago. At the climax of the production, the large cast recreated a street procession of a Tabanca festival that featured an array of costumed characters – kings, queens, brides, and soldiers – who played drums, blew on conch shells, danced, and engaged in call-and-response singing. Despite the vibrancy of the performance, it did not correspond with the expectations of Cape Verdean spectators from the host city of Mindelo, who generally expect to see formal theatre productions with carefully delineated dramatic plots performed at Mindelact. As I will discuss later in the chapter, the regional politics and cultural values of the audience in the venue simply did not match those of the performers onstage. Consequently, many spectators from Mindelo grew impatient with the actors’ incessant marching across the stage and left the theatre. As the actors set off on yet another go-round, I heard a nearby Cape Verdean audience member say, ‘Outra vez?’ (Again?). Those who remained offered only a polite smattering of applause when the actors took their final bows. By deserting the performance space, these national attendees staged a strong objection to both the format of the performance and its cultural content.

Globalized theatre venues: The conundrum of community-building

Mindelact 1999 had become a conduit for impassioned cultural dialogues about community-building in both transnational and national terms. Later, when I began to research international festivals academically, I realized exactly how anomalous an occurrence that was. At one level, international theatre festivals epitomize the enhanced interconnectedness of cultures that characterizes our age of global circulation (Fischer-Lichte 2010; Graham-Jones 2005; Harvie and Rebellato 2003; Rebellato 2009). Yet such festivals also pose significant obstacles to meaningful intercultural exchange. Because they often rely on government and corporate sponsors, international festivals mirror the neoliberal condition that defines today’s economy.¹ They are thus caught up in the demands of the global arts market. For example, at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival in Scotland, government grants subsidize productions that showcase facile versions of ‘national’ culture in order to promote cultural tourism. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which is sponsored by corporations, productions send their casts into the streets to compete for audience members in a perfect example of free market trade (Knowles 2004). As a result, festivals such as these and the Festival d’Avignon in France have been disparaged as ‘supermarket[s] of culture’ (Wehle 2003: 27). Moreover, theatre festivals court high-profile productions based on canonical Western works (and the middle-to upper-class spectators willing to buy expensive tickets to see them), opening festivals to charges of elitism. Even theatre festivals on tiny West African archipelagos cannot escape the whims of the global arts market, which seems bent on evacuating theatre of its dialogic potential.

The structure of the international festival does not help matters. It demands that theatre productions become detached from their places of origin and circulate to new audiences who are largely unfamiliar with the local connotations and nuances the actors portray (Fricker 2003), opening theatre to a host of misreadings. This is especially precarious for non-Western productions that are vulnerable to being interpreted as exotic (Knowles 2004). Although festival organizers may try to prevent such misreadings by soliciting theatre specifically designed to circulate (Fischer-Lichte 2010; Maurin 2003), such productions are often visually stunning but politically impotent. Lacking both substantive content and a rootedness in the lived experiences of local audience members, these theatre productions are what Peterson (2009) calls ‘a kind of global nothing’ (114).

Even small international festivals, such as the Mindelact festival and the Festival d’Agosto in Mozambique, have fallen into this trap. Since most of the spectators at these festivals speak Portuguese, the productions they have hosted from non-Lusophone countries have the kind of visual or audible panache that does not rely on a text to speak to audiences. For example, both festivals have featured the Trottino Clowns of France, who perform Chaplin-inspired physical comedy, and Bernard Massuir of Belgium, who specializes in body-produced rhythms and gibberish words sung a cappella. Mindelact 2005 highlighted the French-Brazilian company Dos a Deux’s mimed theatre spectacle Saudades em Terras d’água (Nostalgia in Water-Ridden Lands), fresh from its successful run at Avignon. While these productions certainly entertained festival crowds, they did not provoke substantial cultural debates. As Knowles (2004) notes, such productions mainly generate discussion amongst festival attendees about theatre itself – technique, form, and aesthetics – rather than about social issues. Paradoxically, then, while international theatre festivals seek a utopian ideal of ‘bringing people together for cultural exchanges,’ the problems inherent in decontextualization, arts markets, and theatre productions that readily circulate actively work against that goal. How can theatre retain its knack for staging social debates and forging genuine cultural connections amid the frenzied circulation of people, money, and artistic products that defines our global era?

One way to answer this complex question is to analyze international theatre festivals that either by design or default support specific transnational communities. Since community-building is one of their primary goals, these festivals often prioritize dialogic spaces (workshops, roundtables, and social events that facilitate post-performance discussions) over artistic showmanship or even ticket sales. This book tracks a Portuguese-language performance circuit through key festival sites in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil, focusing on theatre productions that seem to have retained their interventionist potential even in the context of the festival framework. One of the festivals I discuss takes a hardline approach to Lusophone intercâmbio (cultural exchange). The Festival de Teatro da Língua Portuguesa of Brazil (FESTLIP; Theatre Festival of the Portuguese Language), which has been held nearly each year in Rio de Janeiro since 2008,² restricts participation to theatre troupes from the Portuguese-speaking countries of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé. Other festivals I analyze in this book have been less dogmatic about language. In 1997, the Mindelact festival in Cape Verde became international by positioning itself as a prime venue for Lusophone artistic exchange, but it later dropped the focus on Lusophone theatre from its statutes. The Festival d’Agosto, which was held sporadically in Mozambique between 1999 and 2005, never defined itself as Lusophone. Yet since Cape Verde and Mozambique’s local theatre-going communities are Portuguese-speaking, the festivals have featured a preponderance of theatre companies from Lusophone countries on their programs. Thus, all three festivals have actively drawn together theatre artists and spectators united by a common language, one that is often marginalized at other international festivals such as Edinburgh, Avignon, or even the Grahamstown Arts Festival in South Africa. When festivals interpellate a specific language community, artists and their productions typically have more to say to each other and to spectators because of a shared colonial history and common cultural and linguistic references. By privileging theatre from a discrete set of nation-states joined by a common language, theatre festivals in the Lusophone world may thus avoid some – if not all – of the pitfalls of a global arts market and create spaces for genuine (and often contentious) cultural debates.

This book shines a spotlight on the work performers do in festival venues to bring about these debates. While recent performance scholarship on festivals concedes that theatre festivals can facilitate real cultural dialogues despite the commodity fetishism and elitism that commonly envelop them, the question of how cultural interventions take place in festival markets is open for debate. For example, Knowles (2004) suggests that festival productions may retain their interventionist potential by adopting formalist devices such as meta-theatre or performing in unconventional venues, such as a city block or a storefront window in the festival’s host city, rather than succumbing to the bourgeois conditions of the proscenium stage. Willmar Sauter (2007) locates dialogic potential in what he calls‘theatrical playing,’ or the performer–spectator interactions that meld each party’s sensory, imaginative, and symbolic construction of the fiction unfolding onstage so that the interpretive work happens jointly in the moment of performance. Temple Hauptfleisch (2007a) maintains that the festival itself cannot guarantee that the cultural products on offer will generate meaningful dialogues; the best any festival director and staff can do is to create optimal conditions under which this might happen.

I am aware that my suggestion that artists play a primary role in establishing those optimal conditions at festivals is controversial. After all, theatre performed at a festival is different from performances staged outside that framework. As Henri Schoenmakers (2007) notes, the theatre artists who work on a single production are often presumed to be answerable for its coherence. Yet when the same performance is incorporated into the larger program of a festival, the overall theme and structure of the meta-event can lend other perspectives to the individual theatre events it encompasses. Since artists may have limited awareness of the larger theoretical structure in which they participate, their attempt to convey meaning in a performance is only a small piece of the interpretive framework the festival offers to spectators. Moreover, the structure governing that interpretive process is decidedly hierarchical; artistic directors often select the productions and determine their order and placement in performance venues (Cremona 2007). Actors and individual directors may thus occupy the lower rungs of the corporate structure of a festival, since the board of directors often determines the vision of the festival and artistic directors implement it (Knowles 1995). Even when a theatre director tries to stage a subversive production, she or he might be thwarted by the ideological framework of the festival. Knowles (1995) provides the example of how the critique of capitalism in director Michael Bogdanov’s socialist production of Measure for Measure fell flat in the context of the conspicuous consumption cultivated by the 1985 Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada. More insidiously, a male-controlled arts market may result in festival posters and publicity that may fetishize the bodies of participating female performers who otherwise strive to make feminist art (Holledge and Tompkins 2000). In the context of all of these adverse conditions, how can theatre artists successfully provoke substantial cultural dialogues at international festival venues?

My argument is that under the right circumstances, theatre artists can stage a performance that goes against the grain of the larger framework of a festival, producing a tension between the theatre event and the overall structure that has the potential to push festival attendees (both artists and spectators) to reevaluate the festival’s ideological thrust. This is not to underestimate the power of a festival’s theme and name, which announce ‘the intention as well as the identity the festival chooses for itself’ (Cremona 2007: 6). For example, the Lusophone identity of FESTLIP may cast an ideological shadow over individual productions, even if this is not the intention of the performers. But performers may be able to reconfigure the terms of that discourse in a process that is similar to what Stuart Hall calls articulation. In Hall’s view, ideological positions crystallize into unifying discourses under concrete historical, economic, or social conditions and then become attached to certain political subjects or social groups. Articulation is dialectical: subjects constitute an ideology by espousing it, which they do because they are already constituted by the ideology (they can see themselves in it) (in Grossberg 1986).

By performing at festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil, Lusophone theatre artists may constitute the ideology of lusofonia, the notion of a transnational ‘family’ of Portuguese-speaking peoples united by a common language and by cultural coherences. Because of its colonial undertones and because the Portuguese state vigorously promotes the concept, lusofonia is often critiqued as a homogenizing discourse that disregards real power imbalances among Portuguese-speaking nations. Yet even ideologies such as lusofonia are subject to change. As Hall notes, individuals can evoke cultural transformations over time by reorganizing ‘the elements of a cultural practice,’ shaping them into new ‘discursive formation[s]’ even while they maintain continuity with a past that is already determined (in Grossberg 1986: 54–55).

In this book, I illustrate how theatre artists from Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa undertake these processes of cultural transformation, which I call ‘recasting,’ at Lusophone festivals. While I am aware that the festival structure threatens to commodify African theatre for audiences and contain its radical impact, I attribute transformative potential to the actions and objectives of the performers and to the audience’s reflexive responses to them, all of which may resonate beyond the time of the festival. I call this ‘festival aftermath,’ or the cultural tensions that arise in the wake of festivals, such as new questions about collective identities or the frustrations that accompany intercultural collaborations. By examining festival productions in concert with their aftermaths, we can better understand how international festivals perform the challenging task of building community at local, national, and transnational levels.

Given the hierarchical nature of festivals, any focus on their community-building potential must also take into account power imbalances. When festivals involve participants from both African and Western countries, these issues become paramount because of the legacies of colonialism. These were the issues that arose for me during my first glance at the 1999 Mindelact festival and continue to guide my research today. How can artists from more marginalized nation-states – the former Portuguese colonies in Africa – add their vigorous voices to the collective construction of a Lusophone transnation? On a national level, how can Lusophone theatre festivals facilitate new dialogues among performers and audiences about the colonial histories of participating countries? And how can they facilitate dialogues about contemporary regional divides?

These questions speak to larger concerns about how meaning is made in theatre contexts that have been affected by globalization. One underlying concern for performance scholars is that mechanisms for circulating theatre may ultimately override local epistemologies. This hazard exists in both Western and non-Western theatre contexts. For example, mass-produced musicals such as The Lion King threaten the creativity of local directors since they must make a simulacrum of a Broadway hit (Rebellato 2009). Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in non-Western countries may use canned narratives of trauma in children’s theatre to attract international donors instead of stimulating the imaginations of performers (Edmondson 2005). Accordingly, performance scholars often look for spaces where local knowledges surface in the context of globalizing processes.³ Yet meaning-making is a particularly vexed issue in festival venues, since performances garner new connotations as they travel along festival circuits.⁴ To that end, this book analyzes the content of festival performances in tandem with the festivals’ rhetoric, theme, funding sources, marketing strategies, and overall program. This is akin to Ric Knowles’s method of ‘reading the material theatre’ (2004). However, I add a historical dimension to this model, thus responding to Sauter’s observation that many theoretical paradigms for festivals overlook the historical circumstances that inform the festival occasion (2007). Like other festivals that privilege specific transnational communities, Lusophone theatre festivals lend themselves well to historicization since there is a legacy of nation-to-nation connections for researchers to investigate.

The double signification of the term ‘recasting’ is the theoretical crux of this book. In one sense, recasting suggests a process of reconfiguring, or the act of transforming and interrupting master narratives. Recasting an idea or ideology means shedding new light on it, thus changing the way it is perceived. Recasting in this sense may entail making a new mold; older ideas can be conjured in order to codify new ones (which may in turn require recasting by future generations). In the theatrical sense, recasting invokes the practice of assigning living, breathing bodies to various roles, but for a second time. If the original slate o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction – Global Casting Calls: Performing (Trans)National Identity on Festival Circuits
• 2 Mapping Festivals: Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil in the Lusophone World
• 3 Recasting the Colonial Past: History, Imagination, and Fantasy on Festival Stages
• 4 African Women on Festival Circuits: Recasting Labor Roles and Female Sexuality
• 5 Adaptation and the (Trans)Nation: Creolized Shakespeare, Intercultural Cervantes
• 6 Toward a Conclusion: Forum Theatre in Festival Venues
• Notes
• References
• Index