Abstract:The international tours of Woza, Albert! (first produced 1981) Asinamali! (1985) and Sarafina! (1986) brought Mbongeni Ngema's work outside South Africa and helped educate non-African audiences about ...The international tours of Woza, Albert! (first produced 1981) Asinamali! (1985) and Sarafina! (1986) brought Mbongeni Ngema's work outside South Africa and helped educate non-African audiences about the rich traditions of black South African performance and the dire political and economic conditions which the majority of South Africans lived under during apartheid. Since his early collaboration with Percy Mtwa and Barney Simon on Woza, Albert!, Ngema has been the main director, choreographer, composer and playwright/librettist for the theatre he has conceived and produced. Since Asinamali!, he has worked with large casts and large bands. His scores are rich performative syntheses of township jazz, choral traditions, African American and American musical theatre influences. His choreography combines the regional or topical movement of the piece's theme with other traditional and contemporary South African dance forms. Ngema's plays themselves are specific to a region or township in black South Africa, though the narrative and representational strategies in the pieces extend the local to the national if not global, and the specific to the general and often symbolic.Read More
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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