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174 Book Reviews editorial consistency of The Intercultural Pelformance Reader, but it presents a wide-ranging intratextual debate about strategy among contributors who share an activist, anti-hegemonic politic and a general understanding of what newly constitutes perfonnance and the perfonnative. While The Intercllitural Performance Reader for the most part revisits familiar territory under a new name, then, Pelformance and ClIltural Politics extends the project of exploring , mapping, and devising methods of negotiating new terrain. RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES, UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH GEOFFREY V. DAVIS and ANNE FUCHS, eds. Theatre and Change in South Africa. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. Pp. 336, illustrated. $99; $33 (PB). The word and the stone. Halfway through this fine book of essays from virtually every comer of the contemporary South African theatre world there is a wonderful moment: Mark Fleishman recounts the scene in Fugard's My Children ! My Africa! where a teacher holds a dictionary in one hand and a stone (just come flying through the window from the school boycotters outside) in the other. Though they weigh the same, Mr. M says to his pupil Thami, "the dictionary contains the whole English language while the stone is simply one word" (173). Mr. M (and Fugard) want Tharni to·choose the word, but Thami is of the boycott: he chooses the stone. Fleishman's essay is about movement and gesture in South African perfonnance traditions, and he too chooses the stone, not as an object but as the "process of animation: the gesture of throwing ; the physicalization of the object" (174). To Fleishman, "this choice between the word and the stone symbolises a conflict at the root of the creative process in the South African theatre" (174). Such a creative theatrical tension has everything to do with the internal-colonialist history of South Africa, the great decolonizing political struggle of the eighties, and the vast cultural sea-change enabled (though not guaranteed!) by the universal adult franchise and a huge popular majority for the ANC in the 1994 election. A fundamental premise of the essays in this book is that social change, flying through the theatre window, brings changes in theatre languages: which to choose, the word or the stone? What will theatre send flying back? A similar dynamic structures the essays of Ari Sitas on "The Workers' Theatre in Natal" and Carol Steinberg on "PACT [Perfonning Arts Council of the Transvaal): Can the Leopard Change its Spots?" - Sitas from within a radical theatre practice, and Steinberg from a radical critique of the old apartheid-subsidised theatre industry. Steinberg argues - with aesthetic sublety, not political crudeness - that indigenous perfomnance traditions both Africanist and Euromodernist ("the full rich history of South African culture") require a drastic Book Reviews 175 funding shift from the Eurocentric word (opera, ballet, symphony) to the local, "new nation" stone, a huge shake-up of peI:Sonnel and priorities (2502 ). At the other end of the process, Sitas's beautifully written piece, mixing sociological research and the militant lyricism that is his signature, opens this way: "We start from a simple fact: that all we have are our bodies and what our brains redraft as stories" (J32). In his address to the Natal trade union leadership of COSATU, what he presents is both the stone of an embodied politics (SARMCOL workers' plays The Long March, Bambatha's Children, and Mbube) and the word of a new theatre language. ''Through them, something special has happened in Natal despite the violence" (J 39) - in which, in 1992, 85 per cent of the workers in this theatre experienced "assaults, skirmishes and violent combat including hospitalisation" (J 35). When actors are assassinated for their roles (a process of violent intimidation also reported in the essays by Jerry Mofokeng and Matthew Krouse) and the long march of theatre continues nevertheless, the word has become a stone; and the stone is being caught and flung back as a new word. Davis's and Fuchs's knowing compilation of voices includes splendid pieces from academics like Martin Orkin; leading black directors, actors, and playwrights (some also academics) like Jerry Mofokeng (Markei Theatre resident director), Maishe Maponya (author of Gangsters), Zakes Mda (prolific playwright and Theatre of Development theorist...

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