The politics of theatre and performance training in Zimbabwe 1980–1996

This article is a contextual analysis of the socio-political and ideological conditions of theatre production in Zimbabwe between 1980 and 1996. In this article I discuss the construction of theatre identities, in what I have chosen to call alternative Zimbabwean theatre, at the level of theatre training. In the field of Zimbabwean alternative theatre, a white-dominated theatre organisation, the National Theatre Organisation (NTO), and a black-dominated theatre organisation, Zimbabwe Association of Community based Theatre (ZACT), fought ideological and aesthetic wars and competed with each other for occupying the dominant position. These two organisations competed to host theatre festivals, to train theatre artists, to express their views in the media and consecrate their agents. They competed on the right to define national theatre. It was a cultural struggle to assume the power and right to tell others what national theatre ought to be and to enforce national theatrical conventions. It invariably became a power struggle between two theatrical conventions – the NTO theatrical convention with a strong bourgeois illusionistic theatre orientation and the ZACT theatrical convention with a strong performatic orientation. Since both NTO and ZACT trained the same artists, the article argues that theatre makers used their own agency to choose what they wanted from the workshop materials and created theatre that was an admixture of dramatic theatre and African performative modes.