Embodying Diaspora: Ambivalence and Utopia in Contemporary Cape Verdean Theatre

McMahon, Christina S.

doi:10.1353/ths.2007.0004

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Future research could consider the function that disaporic theatre fulfils in confirming and challenging host and diaspora identities; the target and real constituency of diasporic theatre's audiences; and the reverberations of the performances in the thinking and practices of those audiences. By applying surveys and/or long-form interviews to the study of disaporic performances, cultural geographers could shed new light on a subject which has conventionally been explored mainly in performance studies, 7 leading to cross-disciplinary academic dialogue on topics such as migration, multilingualism, identity-formation and the ideologies of cultural production.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living in the skin of dictatorship: an encounter with the Belarus Free Theatre

Birksted-Breen

2022

cultural geographies

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On 12 March 2022, I attended Dogs of Europe, a performance by Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) at London’s Barbican Theatre. Adapted from the novel by Belarusian writer Alhierd Bacharevič, the play imagines a dystopian future in which Russia’s imperial expansion swallows up swathes of eastern Europe to create a ‘Russian Reich’. The timing of the work is uncanny and unsettling – it unintentionally (but astutely) coincided with the horrifying Russian invasion of Ukraine. The novel and stage adaptation depict a Europe that has become a fragmented European League of States with little unifying purpose or moral compass (‘people in Europe no longer read’, as one character announces). My encounter with Dogs of Europe considers how the BFT uses performance techniques to offer an affecting and intimate geopolitics, with the aspiration of motivating audiences towards an activist stance.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living in the skin of dictatorship: an encounter with the Belarus Free Theatre

Birksted-Breen

2022

cultural geographies

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“…Scholars have chosen to describe the flow of ships, people, and goods around the greater Atlantic region using diagrams with triangles, circles, and webs, but they share a vision that, as result of the legacy of slavery, former colonies in the Atlantic with slave, plantation and colonial histories are linked together by web of cultural, historical, and musical connections (Gilron 1993, Guilbault 1993, Rehm 1975, Fryer 2000, McMahon 2007. Some of the region's shared traits, ideas, and performance practices have been distilled to a list of musical survivals associated with "Musical Africanness.…”

Section: Cape Verdean Connectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cape Verdeans in the Atlantic: the formation of Kriolu music and dance styles on ship and in port

Hurley-Glowa¹

2015

AMJ

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From Adaptation to Transformation: Shakespeare Creolized on Cape Verde's Festival Stage

McMahon¹

2009

Theat Surv

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This is a tale of two directors. The setting is the Republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony and a tiny archipelago nestled off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Framing the story is Cape Verde's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which since 1997 has invited Lusophone theatre artists from three continents to perform a wide array of theatre genres on a mainstage program alongside Cape Verdean troupes. João Branco, a Portuguese director who moved to the islands in the early 1990s, is the artistic director of both the Mindelact Festival and the veteran Cape Verdean theatre troupe GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo/Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese Cultural Center). For Mindelact 2003, GTCCPM performed an abridged version of King Lear rendered in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a mix of Portuguese and several West African languages. Beyond bolstering Branco's cherished goal of creolizing Shakespeare's plays by transporting them to Cape Verde's Afro-European cultural milieu, Rei Lear worked in concert with the festival's media blitz to extol local spectators in Mindelact's host city, Mindelo, for their good taste. Two years later, Herlandson Duarte, a young Cape Verdean director and Branco's former theatre student, staged a Crioulo-language Midsummer Night's Dream at Mindelact with his new theatre company, Solaris. Duarte's production transformed Bottom's play-within-a-play into a searing critique of Mindelense audiences and the structures of authority that prop up the festival itself.

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Embodying Diaspora: Ambivalence and Utopia in Contemporary Cape Verdean Theatre

Cited by 4 publications

References 20 publications

Living in the skin of dictatorship: an encounter with the Belarus Free Theatre

Living in the skin of dictatorship: an encounter with the Belarus Free Theatre

Cape Verdeans in the Atlantic: the formation of Kriolu music and dance styles on ship and in port

From Adaptation to Transformation: Shakespeare Creolized on Cape Verde's Festival Stage

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