Browsing by Author "Ravengai, Samuel"

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    A history of the decolonised African theatre aesthetic: projections of an emergent African theatre practice - Afroscenology
    (Routledge, 2024) Ravengai, Samuel
    With the advent of colonialism and its mission to ‘civilise’ Africans by assimilating them into European culture, some African theatre practitioners responded by aping western theatre, the dominant aesthetic being Aristotelian. The rise of Negritude questioned the inferiorisation paradigm, and impacted African theatre by inspiring work based on African material yet still presented in western aesthetics. Later, as Africans resorted to the armed struggle to dismantle colonialism, African theatre also disbanded western aesthetics to adopt Afrocentric ones. The newly formed independent ministries of culture and higher education encouraged the postcolonial university to either start new theatre departments or to decolonise those inherited from the colonial state. Thus, from the 1960s Africanist artist researchers who worked from the academy or practised community service have run experimental theatre companies not affiliated to the academy to create new practice and theories feeding an African theatre curriculum in the academy. Among the first to develop such an African theatre were Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, where most intellectuals had received western education but worked from African creative modes, with results of a syncretic nature. The processes of decolonisation of theatre in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and more recently South Africa have also had a profound effect on the emergent theatre. This chapter historicises this process and formulates the direction and theory of African theatre of the future.
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    Articulating Embedded Choreographies: Implicit Knowledges As/And Choreographic Strategies
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-08) Snyman, Johannes Hendrik Bailey; Ravengai, Samuel
    This thesis ‘looks back’ to ‘look forward’. I start with the assertion that there is a deficiency of choreographers documenting their processes that emerge in the laboratory. Using mixed methods this thesis focuses on embodied autoethnography to find a means to document and articulate my research and creative process. The first part of this research contextualises choreographic research in South Africa, choreography and embodiment and finally a conceptualisation of my understanding of choreographic strategies. The second part focuses on the embodiment philosophy of Michael Polanyi and articulates a third dimension of knowledge that exists in the gap between tacit and explicit knowledge: embedded-implicit knowledge. A clear correlation is established between embedded-implicit knowledge or ‘knowing’ and intuition. I then crafted Harald Grimen’s (1991) four interpretations of Michael Polanyi’s (1958) ‘tacit knowledge’ into choreographic strategies and used each as an approach in the development of specific creative tasks for the creation of an original choreography: L.I.F.E a history of distance (2017). My inspirations and musings became an invaluable part of this research through articulating my own interpretations of Grimen and my personal history as a source in developing a narrative structure for the work. Finally using a multi-modal reflection framework, developed from various reflexive practices, I reflected on the research and processes to answer the research question: How can Harald Grimen’s four interpretations of Michael Polanyi’s philosophy of tacit knowledge be interpreted as choreographic strategies to articulate the embedded-implicit knowledge within the process of documenting an embedded choreographic practice?
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    Artistic research in Africa with specific reference to South Africa and Zimbabwe: formulating the theory of Afroscenology
    (Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020) Ravengai, Samuel
    How can artistic research offer the opportunity to create knowledge based on African practice and produced from the African context? This presentation will delineate seven approaches to artistic research and argue for decolonial imperatives.