Playing the race game: a performance-as-research project investigating our complicity in performing race
Date
2015-08-25
Authors
Neill, Hamish Mabala Mapoma
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Abstract
This research report consists of a performance-as-research project, titled T for Tea,
accompanied by a written report. This document serves as fulfilment of the written
requirement.
The document is written within a Performance-as-Research paradigm, and includes a
performance style of writing that reaffirms the intention, ethos and creative performativity
established from the onset of the research project. Hence, the document presents an
enhanced dialogue about the complexities of race as a social phenomenon, with specific
reference to South Africa. The study sought to unravel the inherent complicity that reinforces
the on-going notions of ‘race’, ‘racialisation’ and the performance thereof, as essentialist truths.
The written document is constructed as a dialogue using the researcher/performer as the
vehicle to grapple with the study’s intention of using an auto-ethnographic performance
methodology as a critical tool of enquiry into the phenomenon of race in the South African
context. This performative writing style is a characteristic of this methodology and is used to
express argument while constructively disrupting norms, with the intention of inspiring
analysis, reflection and new expression in academia of social phenomena.
The reader is introduced to the dilemma of ‘race’ through this dialogue between researcher/
performer as an ‘essentialist performance’ in the prologue. This leads to an interrogation of
why the study focuses on the choice of ‘complicity’ as a key to understanding the social
performance of race within the South African context. The study then turns its attention to the
notion of research and researches the evolution of the researcher from ethnographer to autoethnographer.
This sets the stage for an interrogation of the making of the play T for Tea. Here
the role of the performer as ethnographer is explored. The writer attempts to demonstrate the
move from a representational form of performance to a performance landscape of
construction, agency and interpretation.
The study concludes, through the performed dialogue, that there is a critical need to find ways
to unearth complicit practices of ‘race’ and ‘racialisation’. Performance that embodies race can
be both essentialist and complicit in the on-going culture of racism in South Africa. An autoethnographic
approach, within a larger Performance Studies paradigm to performance, allows
the researcher/performer an opportunity to examine, expose and perform race in ways that
can help liberate and move away from a historical paradigm that undermines our greater
humanity.
Description
MA (Dramatic Arts) Research Report