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''Ubu and the Truth Commission'' is a South African play by Jane Taylor first performed under the directorship of William Kentridge at The Laboratory in Johannesburg's Market Theatre〔Before the end of 1998, the Market Theatre had already staged three plays on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The first of the other two, ''The Dead Wait'', is a fictitious but conventional tale from the Angolan war which details a soldier's return to South Africa and his confession of a crime. Although based on the TRC, it is not overtly ''about'' it. The second, ''The Story I Am About To Tell'', was produced by a support group for survivors giving TRC testimony, and starred three of them.〕 on 26 May 1997.〔The world premier followed on 17 June 1997, at the Kunsfest in Weimar.〕 Produced by the Handspring Puppet Company, and employing a multimedia approach in the tradition of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, it combines puppetry with live actors, music, animation and documentary footage, while also drawing extensively on Alfred Jarry's absurdist production ''Ubu Roi'' (1896). It fuses the chaos of the Ubu legend with original testimony from witnesses at the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). == The TRC == In her "Writer's Note" to the 2007 book-form publication of the play, Taylor wrote, What has engaged me as I have followed the Commission, is the way in which individual narratives come to stand for the larger national narrative. The stories of personal grief, loss, triumph and violation now stand as an account of South Africa's recent past. History and autobiography merge. This marks a significant shift, because in the past decades of popular resistance, personal suffering was eclipsed — subordinated to a larger project of mass liberation. Now, however, we hear in individual testimony the very private patterns of language and thought that structure memory and mourning. ''Ubu and the Truth Commission'' uses these circumstances as a starting point.〔Taylor, Writer's Note 2007, p. iii.〕 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 1996 with what Taylor described as a "momentous mandate",〔Taylor, Writer's Note 2007, p. ii.〕 to solicit testimony from those who considered themselves casualties, perpetrators or survivors of the apartheid atrocity. Coming almost exactly two years after South Africa's first democratic elections, the Commission's purposes, in Taylor's eyes, were "to retrieve lost histories, to make reparation to those who had suffered, to provide amnesty for acts which were demonstrably political in purpose (and, among the most important ) to create a general context through which national reconciliation might be made possible."〔 "The Commission itself is theatre," wrote William Kentridge, "or at any rate a kind of ur-theatre (). One by one witnesses come and have their half hour to tell their story, pause, weep, be comforted by professional comforters who sit at the table with them. The stories are harrowing, spellbinding. The audience sit at the edge of their seats listening to every word. This is exemplary civic theatre, a public hearing of private griefs which are absorbed into the body politic as a part of a deeper understanding of how the society arrived at its present position."〔Kentridge 2007, pp. viii-ix. Of how more orthodox forms could possibly compete with this, he explained, "Our theatre is a reflection on the debate rather than the debate itself. It tries to make sense of the memory rather than be the memory." (Kentridge 2007, p. ix)〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ubu and the Truth Commission」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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