June 12, 2008

AFRICA CONNECTION AOTEAROA PRESENTS: FOUR PLAY READINGS 

Toi Poneke/Wellington Arts Centre, 61 Abel Smith Street, at 2.00 p.m. Sundays

The next project in our programme of developing appreciation of cultures of Africa and the African diaspora will be rehearsed readings of plays by three African and one Caribbean writer. All four plays have had successful productions internationally, but none has previously been staged in New Zealand.

Each play will be given an informative introduction, and the reading will be followed by open discussion.  Many of the issues dealt with are highly relevant to the experience of migrant and refugee residents here, and we expect lively discussion not only amongst the Africans in the audience, but also other New Zealanders experiencing, perhaps for the first time, something of the background their African neighbours have come from.

Sunday 6 July

From Trinidad:  Remembrance, by Derek Walcott.

Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.  Born in St Lucia, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and, while teaching at Boston University, the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.  Remembrance has been hailed as "Walcott at the peak of his powers of theatrical invention and stagecraft." It is the reminiscences of a retired schoolmaster, experiencing a familiar post-colonial conflict of values. A West Indian critic writes that underlying the play is "our whole bitter past, and yet the play is not bitter but rather haunting, and frequently very funny."

Sunday 13 July 

From Uganda:  The Burdens, by John Ruganda. 

John Ruganda was a Ugandan writer whose work was greatly admired and widely performed, throughout East Africa in particular.  The Burdens is a tragi-comic parable of political life in a corrupt society. Much studied in Kenyan and Ugandan schools and universities, it gives a provocative and witty twist to questions domestic as well as political. 

Sunday 20 July 

From Eritrea: The Other War, by Alemseged Tesfai. 

This is the first Eritrean play ever to be published (1984), and the first to be translated into English. A product of the thirty year struggle of the Eritrean people against Ethiopian rule, The Other War explores the face of war away from the military front, where domestic life becomes another front line.

We hope that discussion of this very challenging play will be led by an Eritrean acquaintance of the playwright and an Ethiopian journalist, both now resident in Wellington. 

Sunday 27 July

From Uganda:   Majangwa, by Robert Serumaga.

A classic of African theatre, Majangwa was first performed at the National Theatre, Kampala, in 1971. It has since been performed many times, including at the Third World Theatre Festival, Manila, Philippines, 1971; and loop City Theatre, Chicago, USA, 1972. In Kenya, Majangwa has been staged not only in the original English but also, in 2004, in a Kikuyu translation.

Majangwa is a subtle – and often comical – study of urban society, revolving round a man-and-wife team of street entertainers, who look back on their debauched life and try to extract some meaning, and some hope, from it.