kentridge - ubu and the truth comission

8/10/2019 Kentridge - Ubu and the Truth Comission

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Ubu

and

the Truth Commission

Jane Taylor, William

Kentridge, et al.


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To seize the surge of language by its soft, bare skull

Beloved, do not die. Do not dare die! I, thesurvivor, I wrap you in words so that the futureinherits you. I snatch you from the death offorgetfulness. I tell your story, complete yourendingyou who once whispered beside me inthe dark.

[Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (London:Vintage, 1999) 39.]


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Ubu and the

Truth

Commission

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5/20

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Woyzeck on the Highveld

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A distinctive feature of the Commission was itsopenness to public participation and scrutiny.This enabled it to reach out on a daily basis tolarge numbers of people inside and outside ofSouth Africa, and to confront them with vividimages on their television screens or on the frontpages of their newspapers The media alsohelped generate public debate on central aspectsof South Africas past and to raise the level ofhistorical awareness. The issues that emerged as a

consequence helped the nation to focus on valuescentral to a healthy democracy: transparency,public participation and criticism. (TRC 1.104)


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By providing the environment in which victims could telltheir own stories in their own languages, the Commission notonly helped to uncover existing facts about past abuses, butalso assisted in the creation of a narrative truth. In so doing,it also sought to contribute to the process of reconciliation byensuring that the truth about the past included the validation

of the individual subjective experiences of people who hadbeen previously silenced or voiceless. (TRC 1.112)

All that a truth commission can achieve is to reduce thenumber of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in publicdiscourse. (Michael Ignatieff, quoted in TRC 1.111)


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A traditional production of Ubuhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWSxTqTjDLE


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UBU ND THE TRC

S

INFLUEN ES

THEATRE OF THE ABSURD, SURREALISM, DADISM,

AND THE AVANT-GARDE


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Ubu/Un chien andalou

http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=L9zhKuV86NA&feature=fvwrel


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unr ku

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEUQNvn8EJQ&feature=related


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Cerberus, the Three-headed Guard Dog

at the Entrance to Helland the Rivers Styx and Lethe


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Verbatim Theatre

Richard Norton-Taylor, The Colour of Justice(1999): Based on transcripts fromthe Stephen Lawrence trials

Duma Kumalo, The Story I Am About to Tell(1998)

Cardboard Citizens, A Few Man Fridays(2012):http://www.cardboardcitizens.org.uk/p2s59.html#video

rather than reperforming those testimonies literally, the play [Ubu] dramatizesthe ruptures and displacements of their telling through the use ofpuppetry (Graham 40)

Badly handled, such stories could easily become a kind of horrorpornography. The puppets assist in mediating this horror. They are not

actors playing a role. Rather, they are wooden dolls attempting to be realpeople. As they attempt to move and breathe as we do, they cross thebarrier of the here and now and become metaphors for humanity. (xvixvii)


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Paradoxically, even as it puts a distancebetween the audience and the victim, thisdisplacement of the testimony brings theaudience closer to the victims experience of

trauma. This effect occurs because thespatial representation of the process ofremembering and bearing witnessthat is,the separation of speaker, speech, andmeaningnot only mimics but also draws the

audiences attention to the fragmentation ofsubjectivity experienced by the traumasurvivor. (Graham 43)


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With this interdependence between a lifelessobject and a human being there exists a greatirony: when they are seen on stage thepuppet appears to have a life while the

puppeteer is dead to the audience. In Ubu &the Truth Commission, this irony is explored togreat depths by making the humanmanipulators visible, and by giving them avery specific focus which often works against

the traditions of puppetry.

(Coetzee 41)

kentridge - ubu and the truth comission

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