Mark Fleishman, PhD

Arbeitsvorhaben

Approaches to Tragedy in (Post)Apartheid South Africa: Ruins, Caves, and the Aftermaths of Colonialism

I will be completing a monograph project examining how tragedy functions as a critical form in South Africa under conditions of colonial aftermath, political transition, and stalled democratization. The research investigates how theatrical practices respond to historical trauma, unresolved violence, and deferred liberation by reconfiguring tragic forms beyond Eurocentric genealogies. The research claims that tragedy in postcolonial contexts is shaped less by catharsis or resolution than by temporal suspension, precarity, and the persistent “not yet” of decolonization.
The monograph engages two dominant but interrelated approaches to tragedy: a political mode, characterized by engagements with the classical archive of Greek tragedy, and a metaphysical mode, grounded in African ritual, cosmology, and indigenous performance traditions. These approaches are analysed through two conceptual metaphors: the “Ruin,” which figures the fragmented remains of colonial cultural forms that are both constraining and generative; and the “Cave,” which signifies ritual spaces of entrapment, transition, and metaphysical negotiation between past, present, and future.
I engage in close readings of three theatrical works created through the Reimagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South (ReTAGS) project: two of my own works, Antigone (not quite/quiet) and Oedipus at Colonus—#aftersophocles, and Mandla Mbothwe’s iKrele le Chiza. I then seek out the genealogies of these works in works by Athol Fugard, Yael Farber, H. I. E. Dhlomo, and Fatima Dike. Drawing on thinkers such as Mbembe, Boulbina, and Quayson, I reconceptualize tragedy as a structure of feeling shaped by ongoing colonial aftermaths rather than as a fixed genre or closed historical form. Ultimately, tragedy in (post)apartheid South Africa is reframed as a critical site for negotiating unfinished pasts and uncertain futures.
Alongside the work on the monograph, I will begin developing a new performance work together with my partner, Jennie Reznek, and collaborators in Berlin, Vienna, and Johannesburg.

Recommended Reading

Fleishman, Mark. “The Difference of Performance as Research.” Theatre Research International 37, no. 1 (2012): 28–37. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883311000745.
–. “Making Space for Ideas: The Knowledge Work of Magnet Theatre.” In Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space, edited by Megan Lewis and Anton Krueger. Intellect; University of South Africa Press, 2016.
–. “Tragedy, Apartheid, (De)Coloniality.” In Tragedy as a Travelling Form: Itineraries from Thespis to Today, edited by Philipp Lammers, Juliane Vogel, and Christina Wald. Methuen Drama, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350466395.0021.

Kolloquium, 27.10.2026

“Stasis Sleeps Within the Polis and Is Always Ready to Stir”: Tragedy and the Dramaturgy of Division

My colloquium examines how contemporary South African theatre reimagines tragedy through the concept of stasis. Drawing on Nicole Loraux’s understanding of stasis as a constitutive division internal to the polis rather than an external threat to it, I explore how tragic performance gives aesthetic and dramaturgical form to enduring conditions of conflict, rupture and suspension. In doing so, I focus on the ways theatre materialises these conditions through performance, ritual, embodiment and spectatorship.

I argue that postcolonial African theatre re-theorises tragedy by shifting attention away from models centred on individual downfall and cathartic resolution towards a tragic mode structured around collective division. In this formulation, tragedy emerges not from a single catastrophic event but from a society caught between an unresolved past and an unrealised future. If civic reconciliation depends upon forms of forgetting, these works instead insist on the persistence of historical fracture within the postcolonial present.

The discussion centres on two productions that stage stasis through contrasting dramaturgical logics. In my work, "Antigone (Not Quite/Quiet)" (2019), tragedy appears as a condition of political impasse. Working among the ruins of the Western classical archive, the production rejects reconciliation as a dramaturgical horizon and instead constructs an ongoing process of excavation. Through repetition, interruption and fragmentation, it renders visible conflicts that remain active within the (post)apartheid polity, presenting stasis as a condition of suspension and deferred resolution.

By contrast, Mandla Mbothwe’s "iKrele le Chiza" (2021) locates tragedy within a condition of metaphysical severance. Through ritual performance, song, ancestral invocation and sensory immersion, the production figures colonial violence as a rupture in the relationships linking the living, the dead and the unborn. Tragedy operates here less as the representation of social conflict than as a performative process of decolonial repair, seeking to restore forms of relational continuity disrupted by dispossession and deracination.

Taken together, these productions suggest that contemporary South African tragedy can be understood as a dramaturgy of stasis: a theatre that refuses closure in order to make enduring division perceptible. Whether figured through political deadlock or metaphysical rupture, stasis becomes the condition through which tragic performance confronts the unfinished legacies of colonialism and apartheid while reimagining the possibilities of community, memory and belonging.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Fleishman, Mark (London, 2025)

Tragedy, apartheid, (de)coloniality

Fleishman, Mark (Cape Town, 2024)

Making / doing / thinking : methods for performance research

Fleishman, Mark (Cape Town, South Africa, 2019)

I turned away and she was gone : a play

Fleishman, Mark (Bristol, UK, 2016)

Magnet theatre : three decades of making space

Fleishman, Mark (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2015)

Performing migrancy and mobility in Africa : cape of flows Studies in international performance

Fleishman, Mark (Mowbray, South Africa, 2012)

The Magnet Theatre 'migration' plays Collected series ; no. 4

Fleishman, Mark (London, 2012)

The difference of performance as research