PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art

Megan Lewis
Past, Present, and Future: A Tense South Africa Performs (review)
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - PAJ 89 (Volume 30, Number 2), May 2008, pp. 93-101

The MIT Press

Project MUSE - PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - Past, Present, and Future: A Tense South Africa Performs (review) Project MUSE Journals PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art PAJ 89 (Volume 30, Number 2), May 2008 Past, Present, and Future: A Tense South Africa Performs (review) PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art PAJ 89 (Volume 30, Number 2), May 2008 E-ISSN: 1537-9477 Print ISSN: 1520-281X Reviewed by Megan Lewis 33rd Annual National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa, June 28-July 7, 2007. Thirteen years after the official dismantling of apartheid, South Africa is still wrestling with its identity as a nation and a new democracy. The 2007 National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown, the world's largest theatre festival outside Edinburgh, revealed a panoply of interrogative forms -- from dance to theatre to visual art to stagings of personal identities -- that explored the shameful past, the corrupt yet developing present, and the uncertain future. The politics of belonging, dislocation, gender, voice, and identity formation(s) echoed through the two-week, sunshine-drenched festival, which included offerings on a Main and Fringe circuit. The social debates and realities of contemporary Southern Africa informed and troubled much of the work at this year's festival. To the north, Zimbabwe is collapsing under Robert Mugabe's draconian leadership and South Africa's African National Congress (ANC) government refuses to intervene. As satirist...