Hilde Slinger (1932-2021)

Hilde Slinger, former President of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (SSOSA), passed away earlier this month at the age of 88.

Friends and colleagues have paid tribute to her as an energetic and dedicated educator, literary and cultural activist, writer and editor.

Slinger was a teacher and school principal for many years. After retiring from the Holy Family Convent in Durban, she moved to Grahamstown (Makhanda) and became involved in SSOSA branch activities. She was president of the Society from 2000-2007, and during this time she convened two of its triennial congresses.

Laurence Wright, himself a former president of the Society and previously director of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), where Slinger had an office during her tenure, recounts this anecdote about her taking on the role: “One of Hilde’s outstanding characteristics was her ability to see the best in people. She was good at encouraging and supporting. However, when she was elected President of SSOSA she was both delighted and appalled. Daunted might be the right word. She confessed her trepidations to Guy Butler, who with a twinkle looked her straight in the eye: ‘Hilde, it will be alright’. She brightened and her face lifted like the petals of a flower opening. And it certainly was.”

In addition, Hilde was the longtime editor of the Society’s Newsletter, incorporating Occasional Papers and Reviews (OPAR), the predecessor of Shakespeare ZA. She also contributed to the SSOSA journal, Shakespeare in Southern Africa.

Hilde remained active in literary and cultural initiatives, supporting numerous productions of Shakespeare’s plays for and by schools. Her involvement in the South African Writers’ Circle was recognised by the establishment of the SAWC Hilde Slinger Award for Poetry.

Other past presidents of SSOSA have expressed condolences on behalf of the Society and all those who knew Hilde, especially her friends in Makhanda. Warren Snowball attests that “Hilde loved the plays of Shakespeare and was very knowledgeable about them. I never knew her to have a quarrel or to say an unkind word about anyone. She was an inspiration to all who came in contact with her and everyone admired her for both her knowledge and for her dedication to whatever she undertook. I sorely miss her presence.” Malcolm Hacksley will remember “her intelligence, her compassion, her insight, her humour, her work ethic, her faith”.

Hilde’s son, Jonathan Slinger, writes: “My mother loved the time that she spent in Grahamstown and always had very happy memories of the projects and people with whom she worked. We, as her family, are grateful for the warmth, compassion and friendship shown to her by those with whom she worked so closely.”

The Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at Wits University

Earlier this month, the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre (TCC) was established as a Research Unit in the School of Literature, Language and Media at the University of the Witwatersrand. Building on a significant but often-neglected history of translating Shakespeare’s plays into South African languages, the TCC seeks to promote scholarship, teaching and performance that engages with Shakespeare as a multilingual phenomenon. This focus is complemented by an emphasis on transnationalism: understanding Shakespearean histories and contemporary practices in different national contexts by situating Shakespeare outside of limited ‘English’ paradigms (and vice versa).

William Tsikinya-Chaka?

The Centre takes its name from Solomon T. Plaatje’s contribution to the 1916 Book of Homage to Shakespeare. Plaatje – a political activist, journalist, historian, novelist and linguist – is recognised as producing the first published translations of Shakespeare’s plays into an African language. As Plaatje himself noted, however, he was working within an already established practice of translating Shakespeare: he cites the reference of a Motswana court chieftain to “William Tsikinya-Chaka”, or “William Shake-the-Sword” (a Setswana translation, Plaatje tells us, that is “perhaps more free than literal”). The Book of Homage is, of course, bound up in British colonialism and in competing European nationalisms.

Yet it is also a significant manifestation of ‘global Shakespeare’ and of multilingual Shakespeares – arguably even foreshadowing the advent of postcolonial Shakespeares. Its paradoxes, and those of a figure like Sol Plaatje, remind us to approach multilingualism and transnationalism in Shakespeare studies with critical rigour.

Vision and mission

The Tsikinya-Chaka Centre will support researchers, teachers and arts practitioners whose work is informed by historical and/or contemporary translation, adaptation and appropriation beyond the narrow national and linguistic confines of ‘English’ Shakespeare. It will advocate for the consideration of these histories and current practices as key factors in arguments for and against Shakespeare’s presence on educational curricula at secondary and tertiary level, and in discussions about pedagogy – how Shakespeare is taught (if he is to be taught), and indeed what is taught with or through Shakespeare. The Centre will emphasise and promote Shakespeare in performance. It will also seek to digitise and curate textual archives of Shakespeare in translation.

In an era of closing borders and the ongoing threat of chauvinistic ethno-nationalism in many countries around the world, it is more urgent than ever to find ways of affirming transnational (‘global’) connections without dismissing the nuances of national (‘local’) contexts. A focus on language, translation and translanguaging via Shakespeare is one means of doing so. This multilingual emphasis also mitigates against the colonial biases infused into the notion of a ‘universal’ Shakespeare. To study Shakespeare as a global figure is to undertake a sustained confrontation with racism, elitism and even jingoism – both in the imperial processes of the last four centuries and in our contemporary moment.

The TCC is committed to:

• Producing innovative research at the intersection of Shakespeare, transnationalism and multilingualism

• Establishing connections between Wits and other South African universities

• Partnering with institutions and with scholars internationally

• Promoting multilingualism and translanguaging in teaching at schools and universities, as well as in Shakespearean performance

• Facilitating transnational exchange and cooperation between performing artists and scholars

• Supervising and teaching postgraduate students

• Seeking to inform education and arts policy development

• Maintaining a programme of public events and publication in non-specialist platforms to raise the profile of the research and practice undertaken by the TCC and its affiliates.

The Tsikinya-Chaka Centre will be launching its website early in 2021. Watch this space!

SHAKESPEARE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA volume 33

Volume 33 (2020) of the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa will be published online and in print at the beginning of November. It is a special volume on “Shakespeare and Social Justice in South Africa”. In this post the journal’s editor, Chris Thurman, shares his introduction with us.

The front cover of Shakespeare in Southern Africa volume 33

It would be both brave and foolish to editorialise about 2020 – the year that spawned a million pandemic-informed think pieces – not least because, as I write these words, there are still a couple of months to go, during which time the international rollercoaster of political, public health, environmental and economic narratives is likely to complete more loop-de-loops.

Yet it would also be remiss of me not to remark on the ways in which 2020 has affected Shakespeare in South Africa. We may mourn lost opportunities; perhaps the most prominent example is the Fugard Theatre’s Hamlet, which promised to be a seminal production, although the devastation wrought on the performing arts sector by the closure of theatre spaces across the country affected hundreds of actors, directors, crew members and producers who would otherwise have been making Shakespearean magic. As in so many countries around the globe, the South African theatre landscape was marked by the shift from stage to screen. It has felt appropriate to grieve the temporary loss of live, embodied interaction between actor and audience that is at the core of the theatrical experience. It has also felt appropriate to bemoan the phenomenological ‘sameness’ of screen-watching, lending similar qualities to theatre-via-Zoom as to meetings-via-Zoom and teaching-via-Zoom. Nevertheless, it is equally important to acknowledge the host of innovative responses that Covid-19 has solicited from theatre makers. Undoubtedly, what had already been developing for some years as a hybrid stage-and-screen model will now become increasingly common: theatre for both in-person and digital audiences, combining the irreplaceable intimacy of live performance with the exponentially larger reach of filmed performance.

In an article published in January 2020, reflecting on Shakespeare ZA as a project of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa that has, since 2017, sought to build a digital meeting-place for theatre makers, academics, teachers, students and members of the public interested in South African responses to Shakespeare, I wrote: “It is vital that ... Shakespeare ZA expands its archive of video material” and that “this includes examples of Shakespeare performed in African languages”.[1] I also expressed cautious optimism about “the intersection of digital Shakespeares and South African education”, but felt compelled to note the barrier of unequal access to online resources among school learners and university students.[2]

Within a few months, Covid-19 had resulted in both widely increased use of digital resources in teaching and learning and in the online availability of hours of South African Shakespeare on screen. This ranged from the recuperation of recent theatrical undertakings, such as the experimental Umsebenzi ka Bra Shakes (2019) at the Centre for the Less Good Idea and a production concept treatment of Twelfth Night (also 2019) directed by Greg Homann, to Shakespearean content on the virtual National Arts Festival programme for 2020: Third World Bunfight’s version of Verdi’s Macbeth and Buhle Ngaba’s solo show Swan Song. The Market Theatre introduced a weekly series, “Chilling with the Bard”, in which some of South Africa’s finest actresses delivered monologues for the camera. And then there was #lockdownshakespeare.

I will admit to a vested interest here, as I had the pleasure of working with Ngaba in launching this initiative – a campaign to provide both moral and financial support to actors who were housebound and barred from the stage during lockdown. The result was some fifty monologue performances that are now part of Shakespeare ZA’s digital resources, shaking up assumptions about what Shakespeare in South Africa ‘looks’ or ‘sounds’ like and providing teachers, learners and fellow theatre makers with vivid interpretive prompts (and perhaps even ideas for new productions in future?). Financial assistance from CN&CO, who have partnered with the Shakespeare Society over the last few years and have enabled various other projects, was supplemented by a generous grant from Business and Arts South Africa (BASA) to make #lockdownshakespeare possible. The cover of Volume 33 pays tribute to the participants and gestures towards their riveting performances.

The back cover of Shakespeare in Southern Africa volume 33

Lockdowns of varying severity in 2020 left many people hankering for years gone by – for the time BC (Before Covid). I didn’t have to look too far into the past to discern what seemed to be a halcyon time, at least as far as Shakespeare in South(ern) Africa was concerned. In May 2019, SSOSA held its triennial congress in Cape Town, centred around a conference on the theme of “Shakespeare and Social Justice: Scholarship and Performance in an Unequal World”. The event was energising, challenging, intellectually provocative, socially affirming: a wonderful gathering of scholars committed to the topic at hand and to its permutations in the classroom, the theatre and beyond. As the theme of the conference should remind us, however, we ought not to be nostalgic for a pre-Covid world that was full of injustice – in various ways aggravated by the pandemic, although there have been chinks of light, promises not of a utopian future but (perhaps) of slow structural change that might indeed lead to a more just world. In the meantime, for activist-academics, there is much work to be done.

The articles in this volume have been developed from papers prepared for the “Shakespeare and Social Justice” conference with a South African focus. (Other papers presented at the conference are being expanded into essays for a collection to be co-edited by Sandra Young and myself.) There are some pleasing echoes and connections between the eight articles. Marguerite de Waal’s account of productions of Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra staged before, during and after student protests on South African university campuses in 2015-16 may be paired with Néka da Costa’s reflections on her role as director of the latter production, which travelled to schools around the country in 2018. Fiona Ramsay’s article, too, links performance and education in its assessment of the use of accents and Original Pronunciation in working with drama students. David Schalkwyk connects student protests to Shakespeare in a different fashion: by comparing The Fall, the collaborative Baxter Theatre production engaging with the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student movements, to John Kani’s Kunene and the King. Kani’s play is scaffolded by King Lear as it addresses race and racism in South Africa.

Complementing the focus in these articles on staging or appropriating Shakespeare in a decolonising South African context, Sarah Roberts revisits an earlier post-apartheid moment: the 1998 Take Away Shakespeare Company King Lear. Incorporating personal memories and reflections on practice, Roberts contributes to the ongoing and necessary task of documenting South African theatre history, and Shakespearean performance in particular. Her treatment of the Take Away Lear contrasts it with Jonathan Munby’s production of the play in London two years ago. Geoffrey Haresnape’s article is also in dialogue with earlier attempts to link King Lear to injustice in South Africa – from Martin Orkin to Nicholas Visser – as he presents a reading of the play in light of current debates about land restitution and the policy of expropriation without compensation.

Lisa Barksdale-Shaw likewise uses this previous scholarship on King Lear and land (Visser citing Orkin citing Sol Plaatje) as her starting-point in an article that interprets Caesar’s will in Julius Caesar as an attempt to empower the people of Rome through the conveyance of land; this public bequest, and the document recording it, can be related to the constitutional argument for land reform in South Africa. Laurence Wright takes us further back into South African history, and the history of invoking Shakespeare in response to injustice, by considering Lady Anne Barnard’s review of a performance of 1 Henry IV at the African Theatre in 1801 and her critique of colonial governor Sir George Yonge. Wright’s focus on Barnard’s complexities and contradictions allows him to offer a Janus-headed interpretation of this moment: looking two centuries into the past, to Shakespeare’s time, and two centuries into the future, to our own. He asks: “Can post-revolutionary notions of social justice be imposed on pre-revolutionary works of art?”

This question is indirectly answered in Scott Newstok’s new book How to Think Like Shakespeare, reviewed in these pages by Tony Voss. In Voss, Shakespeare in Southern Africa has its book reviewer par excellence; happily, the present volume includes a second review by him, combining Stewart Elden’s Shakespearean Territories and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s Shakespeare’s Englishes.

Volume 33 concludes with a tribute to André Lemmer, who died in August this year at the age of seventy-five. Paul Walters and Charles van Renen’s obituary describes Lemmer as “a person of immense – seemingly boundless – energy and creativity”. As teacher, editor and theatre maker, he made an immense contribution to the study and performance of Shakespeare in South Africa.

Thanks are due, once again, to all the editorial consultants who acted as peer reviewers of articles in this volume, and to Liz Gowans for her expert typesetting and design.

[1] Chris Thurman, “Shakespeare.za: Digital Shakespeares and education in South Africa”. Research in Drama Education (RiDE, Special issue on “Teaching Shakespeare: Digital Processes”) 25.1 (2020): 63.

[2] Ibid.: 64.

Shakespeare Schools Festival goes online (19-25 September)

Kids Haven Drama Group: Julius Caesar

Owing to Covid-19 restrictions, festival organisers have had to re-imagine the Shakespeare Schools Festival performances that were scheduled for the remainder of this year. After consultation with learners, educators and SSF team members, it was decided that the event would go online. The advantage is that SSF performances will now be available to a world-wide audience!

The virtual SSF will take place from 19 to 25 September and audiences can look forward to a variety of film versions of productions by participating schools and community groups from the Western Cape, Gauteng, Kwazulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, as well as international participation from partner schools in Russia and Estonia. An additional component this year will be the Bayabuza programme: ‘They Ask; We Answer’, an online webinar series that will focus on assisting students to develop critical thinking and examination skills. The facilitators include Shelani van Niekerk, Kaulana Lynn Williams and Sivenkosi Gubangxa, who are all proficient in the Grade 10-12 English set works and are trained theatre, film and television professionals.

Dream Work Productions: Antony and Cleopatra

KASI RC - Shack Art School and Theatre: Hamlet and As You Like It

The Shakespeare Schools Festival (SSF) will be combining its events for the second half of 2020 into a virtual festival - a first for this popular fixture, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year.  

Siyakhona Youth Group: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew

De Blac Art House: The Merchant of Venice

Dream Work Productions: Antony and Cleopatra

The full online festival programme will be available from 17 September via www.ssfsa.co.za and the festival's social media pages; viewers can click through to the SSF YouTube channel where virtual showcases and live webinar sessions can be accessed.

Launch of STAND (Sustaining Theatre and Dance Foundation)

At Shakespeare ZA, we know how tough it has been for performing artists over the last five months. But here is some good news: STAND (Sustaining Theatre and Dance Foundation) was launched at the start of September and YOU, theatre maker/watcher/lover/fighter, are invited to participate!

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The STAND Foundation is a new, independent public benefit organisation that aims to provide ongoing support for the South African theatre and dance ecosystems.

The members of the steering committee are Gregory Maqoma (Chair), Yvette Hardie, Unathi Malunga, Saartjie Botha, Ismail Mahomed, Musa Hlatshwayo, Debbie Turner, Sbonakaliso Ndaba, Ricardo Peach and Mike van Graan.

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At the launch, Maqoma (as Chairperson of the STAND Foundation), made five key points about STAND:

1. We are an independent, non-partisan entity, registered with the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission as a non-profit company. We are in the process of applying for Public Benefit Organisation status. And we will establish a trust, or an endowment to ensure the longevity of the Foundation. The committee members serve as individuals rather than as representatives of organisations in a voluntary capacity, and the committee is a self-perpetuating one that tries to be representative of the dance and theatre sectors, to be representative of all the things that are important to us in South Africa – ‘race’, gender, sexual orientation, etc; that combines experience and youth; and that includes the necessary expertise without being cumbersomely large.

2. The STAND Foundation has arisen out of the challenging COVID-19 conditions, but we are not an artists’ relief agency. The lockdown restrictions and the adverse impact on our sector have simply sharpened our vision to nurture, promote and celebrate contemporary South African dance and theatre which will always be in need of some form of support, whether we were in the midst of a pandemic or not. We applaud the work of other agencies engaged in relief funding to artists during this time, and we will work with them, but STAND’s vision is to provide work and opportunities for those in the dance and theatre sectors to earn an income through their work, and so keep them doing what they love to do, and in this way, to affirm their dignity.

3. While our committee includes individuals with much experience and stature within the dance and theatre sector, the STAND Foundation is not and does not seek to be the voice of the dance and theatre sector. We do not have the mandate, capacity or the desire play such a role. We are a few individuals who have come together to share our networks, our experience and whatever access to resources we have in order to serve the broader dance and theatre ecosystems of our country. Experts dealing with the coronavirus pandemic often repeat the phrase that ‘we are safe only when we are all safe’; for as long as someone is infected, we are all potentially faced with an existential crisis as we are all at risk of being infected. And so we all need to play our part in keeping all of us safe. We have extended this metaphor to our sector…rather than competing with each other for limited resources, or allowing the gap to widen between those who have historical and contemporary privilege and those who don’t, we need to overcome our divisions, to stand together and work towards a dispensation where we all benefit, where our whole sector is vibrant, sustainable and integrated into our broader society. The last twenty-six years have shown that we cannot depend on government, neither can we simply use our talents and expertise to support others; we have a right and the responsibility to look after ourselves, and particularly the vulnerable amongst us, both because it is in our interests to do so – we are safe only when we are all safe - and because it is the right thing to do.

4. We will seek to work with partners – organisations, institutions, individuals, festivals, theatres, companies – across our sector to make things happen. We do not see ourselves building a large staff contingent or having the capacity to implement numerous projects ourselves; our desire is to catalyse cooperation, to build partnerships and to work and stand together to build our sector. Of course, we will invite and encourage ideas and proposals that we could work with in partnership with stakeholders in the sector. At this point, our priorities are being determined by the conditions we are in currently and by a vision that we would want to develop for dance and theatre sector in concert with the sector. And so we will evolve as STAND Foundation as conditions change and hopefully, as the work we do with others starts to have positive impact. We invite you to work with us; we are not special, or different, we are part of the sector as much as anyone else, and we have chosen to work together in this way, for the greater good of our sector. If there are other initiatives that are driven by the same impulse, we welcome them and again, we would want to work with, rather than against anyone.

5. We are not a funding agency. We have raised funds and we will raise funds from local supporters, from partners within the sector, from corporates, from international agencies and through fundraising drives and initiatives that that we will undertake. But we are not a funding agency. We will raise and use these funds to support projects that help to pursue and realise the vision that we develop in concert with stakeholders in the sector, as well as projects that we believe are necessary interventions at particular times.

To join the STAND database, sign up here.

To contact STAND, e-mail greg@standfoundation.org.za or mike@standfoundation.org.za

AND CHECK OUT THE WEBSITE HERE!

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