We Are Proud to Present A Presentation About the Herero of

Namimbia, FormerlyKnown as South-West Africa, From

the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915

By Jackie Sibblies Drury

Jackie Sibblies Drury-All about group collaboration…as is this play

South African Artist

William Kentridge

Important artistic influence

COLLAGE IS COOL

The Herero Genocide

• The Herero genocide killed 60,000 Hereros. It featured concentration camps, skin and bone people, mass graves, medical experiments and German record-keeping-more than 30 years before the Jewish Holocaust.

This was real

Herero Prisoniers

Theatre-is it real?

• How do you theatrically tell a story based in truth, a horrible truth?

• Mix it up with humanity, humor, doubt, derision, honesty, silliness, and never forget what it is about deep down…….and never forget you aren’t that different from those you portray………

Picture from Premiere

• It has to be funny!

It has to be chilling

It tolerates heightened theatricality

Meta-Theatrics

metatheatrics

• It may present action so alien, improbable, stylized, or absurd that we are forced to acknowledge the estranging frame that encloses a whole play. It may, on the other hand, break the frame of the "fourth wall" of conventional theatre, reaching out to assault the audience or to draw it into the realm of the play. It may -- by devices like plays within plays, self-consciously "theatrical" characters, and commentary on the theatre itself -- dwell on the boundaries between "illusion" or artifice and "reality" within a play, making us speculate on the complex mixture of illusion and reality in our ordinary experience. Any theatrical device can work metatheatrically if we sense in it a certain deliberate reflexiveness, a tendency to refer to itself or to its context in a more general mode: to theatre itself; to art, artifice, and illusion; and perhaps above all to language as such.

• Remarks by Lionel Able who coined the phrase “Metatheatre”

Rehearsal Rooms

Rehearsal Rooms

Rehearsal Rooms

Rehearsal Rooms

Rehearsal Rooms

Rehearsal Rooms

Rolling Ladders

Rehearsals

Rehearsals

Rehearsals

Story Theatre