Narratives of resistance in Amakhosi Theatre Production’s Workshop Negative

Abstract

This paper deploys theories of social performance as a lens to engage and examine narratives of resistance in Amakhosi Theatre Productions’ Workshop Negative. It locates and frames Amakhosi Theatre Productions’ Workshop Negative as a personal and community narrative inscribed with agency. Deploying the social theories of performance and the narrative of resistance approach as an analytical framework, this paper analyses and critiques Workshop Negative as a representation of everyday lived experiences and meaning-making in the community as well as undertake a nuanced reading of the Zimbabwean socio-cultural and political landscape under which this narrative (work) was created, produced and performed. This article critiques Workshop Negative’s aesthetic playmaking methods as narrative techniques of storying its members’ lives, voices and that of the community. In essence, I seek to understand how members of Amakhosi Theatre Productions aesthetically made meaning of their lives and illustrated these narratives in Workshop Negative. I argue that Amakhosi Theatre Productions’ situatedness in the community enabled them to aesthetically create and perform narratives located in the everyday lived experiences of the Bulawayo community. In so doing, I submit that Amakhosi Theatre Productions’ plays such as Workshop Negative linked personal stories with the big story narratives of Bulawayo and/ Zimbabwe.