Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
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June 15, 2010
Closing Night
It is, apparently, an old tradition of the theater to give the director, on closing night, a bouquet of flowers stolen from a graveyard. Nobody I’ve questioned at Court Theatre has ever heard of this tradition, much less practiced it. The tradition evidently originates from a time when graveyard flowers were the cheapest recourse for struggling theater artists.
Sunday night marked not only the closing night of Sizwe Banzi is Dead but the last day of Court’s 2009-2010 season. (All of our closing traditions at Court involve certain rituals better left unrecorded.) While the Sizwe stage is struck and newly minted UofC graduates evacuate Hyde Park en masse, Hyde Park is weathering a mood of sweet egression. We’ll still be here while the stage is dark, though, preparing for The Comedy of Errors and the rest of the 2010-11 season. (We’ll also be spending time exploring a few exciting new ideas for 2011-12.) Stay tuned.
June 11, 2010
South Africa in the World Cup
Joao Silva for The New York Times
The World Cup is the most-watched event on earth, and South Africa is eager to be seen, especially if the cameras ignore the shacks of the poor and focus instead on the beautiful new stadiums, the panoramic view from Cape Town’s Table Mountain and the wild animals flourishing in the bush.
Much is expected from the monthlong tournament: global recognition for an international up-and-comer; a pie in the face for pessimists who believed that the stadiums would never be completed on time; a jolt of good feeling in a nation with a dangerously dwindled supply of inspiration.
Sixteen years ago, as Nelson Mandela took the presidential oath and apartheid slipped further into ignominy, he declared that South Africa was no longer “the skunk of the world” but rather a “rainbow nation” where people of all colors could live in harmony. A year later, he urged his countrymen — black and white — to support their national rugby team, the sports obsession of the nation’s Afrikaner population. The squad won the world championship, a feel-good story retold last year in the movie “Invictus.”
South Africans now hope for a similar transcendent moment, this time from soccer, the favorite sport of the nation’s blacks. People here may not expect their country to win the tournament, but they believe it will throw a winning party. The host team faces Mexico in the opening match on Friday.
“We were once the rainbow nation, the world’s greatest fairy tale, and we want to be so again,” the writer Mark Gevisser said. “We need the world to love us again, sometimes it seems, before we can love ourselves.”
Read the full article here.
June 4, 2010
An Actor Prepares
Chiké Johnson, one of the two actors in Sizwe Banzi is Dead, writes about preparing for the play’s opening monologue, a daunting 45-minute piece of text written for one actor.
Preparing for the opening monologue of Sizwe Banzi is Dead was a process of removing myself from the world. It was just me and the play for close to three weeks and no one else. Apart from the occasional phone calls to my family and buying groceries, I was in my apartment working. I spent 6 or more hours at rehearsal working with Ron, Allen, Kelli, Aurelia and M. on characterization, history of the play, time period and accent. I would then come home and begin working on my own, making everything we covered over the course of the rehearsal day my own. Memorizing lines was a challenge, I am usually very good at text memorization, but this was a lot and for the first 15 pages to have no dialogue, it pushed me. Anyway, I covered page by page making sure that I was not just learning lines but letting each sentence pull me into the next so that by the end of the monologue there was a through line, meaning that Sizwe’s thoughts were not just random, but there was a reason behind what he was saying.
Learning the accent was nothing short of repetition. I started off with a general African accent and then M. [the dialect coach] came in and started working with specifics. Working with M. was fantastic and frustrating at times because sometimes I really could not here some things that I was saying. For example, my a’s: the South African ‘a’ is pronounced as an ‘ah’ sound, while we have more of an ‘a, e’ sound when we pronounce it. For weeks I had no idea that I was not saying ah until we actually started previews and then it clicked. Once you can hear it then you can begin to change the sounds in your mind then let them flow through your mouth. Another thing was actually learning some words in some of the native languages. This was difficult for me because some of the words used in Zulu have no equivalent sound in English so I couldn’t find a reference point in my brain to look back on or guide me. I had to learn it from scratch, so to speak.
The are a couple of reason’s I think this play is relevant for today. One, Arizona, making people carry passbooks in this country is scary. If we can let this happen in this country in 2010, there is no telling what the powers may be will come up with next. Fortunately we don’t all live in Arizona, but this law will eventually have an affect on all of us if we are not careful and fight such a horrible idea. Two, oppression is timeless and colorless we cannot fail to remember what has and is happening all over the world. This my way of saying remember what was, this our history and it must not be forgotten, it is our guide.
Sizwe Banzi is Dead runs Wednesday through Sunday until June 13.
May 27, 2010
Daniel Minter’s Art
Maine-based artist Daniel Minter has designed the postcards for two Court shows this season, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and The Mystery of Irma Vep. Sizwe director and resident artist Ron OJ Parson brought Daniel to our attention, and now he’s returned to contribute art for the final show, Sizwe Banzi is Dead. Here’s a full image of Daniel’s original art, based on photographs shared by Ron of South African townships:
More of Daniel’s art can be seen here.
Sizwe Banzi is Dead runs Wednesdays through Sundays until June 13.
May 19, 2010
The Arizona Immigration Law
Immigrants and advocates for the illegal marched April 23 outside the State Capitol in Phoenix. Monica Almeida/The New York Times
In the post-show discussions after Sizwe Banzi is Dead this weekend, one issue that audience members consistently raised was the new Arizona immigration law, which grants state and local police broad powers to enforce federal immigration law. The New York Times paraphrases the bill:
The law would require the police “when practicable” to detain
people they reasonably suspected were in the country without
authorization. It would also allow the police to charge immigrants
with a state crime for not carrying immigration documents. And
it allows residents to sue cities if they believe the law is not
being enforced.
Audiences have been drawing connections between the enforcement of immigration documents in Arizona and the South African passbook law, which regulated the movement and employment of South African blacks and led to frequent unwarranted incarceration under legal apartheid. While I would caution against making broad statements of equivalency between U.S. immigration law and South African apartheid, what’s resonant in Sizwe Banzi is Dead is the infringement on basic human rights and dignity that a banal state-issued document (like a passbook, like immigrant papers) can support. Thus, as a widely cited example, a brown-skinned man may get pulled over for so much as rolling through a stop sign as an excuse to check his immigrant papers. The argument against the law, an argument that Sizwe Banzi is Dead makes quite powerfully, is that this kind of targeting and profiling of a sect of the population—namely, poor brown-skinned men and women—is nothing short of an existential infringement that violates an individual’s human (or natural) rights. The assertion from supporters of the new law that “you should have nothing to fear if your papers are in order” misses the larger consequence that such a law creates a paranoid system of human coercion over an unempowered people. Thus does Sizwe Banzi assert that “I am a man,” thus do Arizona immigrants assert that “we are human”—these laws take away those basic assumptions.
Allen Gilmore as Sizwe Banzi in Sizwe Banzi is Dead
Of course, what you think of the Arizona Senate bill has a lot to do with what you think of U.S. immigration law, which the Arizona law, in some ways, merely follows to its logical conclusion (ie. sustained local enforcement). What Sizwe Banzi is Dead does, however, is to illustrate exactly the human cost of such a measure, and indeed, goes a long way toward forcing your opinion on the way we handle regulate immigration in this country.
You can read the full text of the Arizona Senate bill here.
