Oga’s Ark

Oga’s Ark

Dramaturgical work on the interaction of European and African performance practices in my play, Oga’s Ark, began in April 2008 with Debbie Seymour as dramaturg and director, and culminated in a week-long exploratory workshop with actors in Studio 3, Goldsmiths College (15-19 Sept, 2008), involving mask work by Sue Dacre, music by Ayo Thomas, dance by Peter Badejo and voice work by Claudette Williams. A workshop performance was held on 19 Sept, 2008 for an invited industry audience and departmental colleagues followed by discussion of modes of transcultural performance in the African diaspora and their impact on British theatre practice.

Oga’s Ark is a play which explores the failure of the state and the fate of its actors. Following the attempts of a theatrical troupe after their bus has crashed to improvise a new performance of George Orwell’s satire on Stalinism, Animal Farm, their use of African masks to compensate for the drastically reduced cast size implicitly links failed states in Africa to the collapse of the communist state in Eastern Europe.

A post-modern mosaic of African and diasporic voices, concerns and performance idioms is threaded with consciously recycled Western/European elements, replaying and subverting ideas of self and other. For example, the suggested recycling of masks from Disney’s Lion King to serve an improvised African masquerade performance.

The play explores ways in which an ostensibly African performance can be played to European audiences so as to collapse illusions of distance and difference. The testing and development of Oga’s Ark across borders, in different languages and cultural contexts, helped to probe alternative approaches and responses to the play and establish the terms of its transcultural as well as its local significance within each culture.

The play was given a rehearsed reading in Russian translation at the Lubimovka Playwrights’ Festival in Moscow (2004) and published in Bulgarian in Homo Ludens (Sofia, 2005). A rehearsed reading with Scottish actors was held at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre (2005) and dramaturgical work with mask, dance and African performers culminated in a workshop production at Goldsmiths College (2008).

Response to the play in Russia was deeply divided between acceptance of the play as relevant to Russian experience (“It’s about us”, Maria Kozlovskaya, translator) and rejection of its subversion of the distinction of self and other (“The play is bright, hot, foreign and un-Christian”, Elena Gremina, dramaturg).

In Bulgaria, where publication was accompanied by a workshop-seminar at the Varna International Theatre Festival (2005), the play was accepted and understood in terms of Bulgaria’s historical multi-culturalism and the post-modern.

The response of both actors and audience at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, Scotland revolved around issues concerning the ownership of culture (Scottish actors taking ‘black’ roles) and the impact of a state-promoted, devolutionary nationalism on Scottish identity politics. Political discussion appeared to mask an anxiety about how to frame the play’s demands: a black play, a Scottish play, or a play about people?

Use of an African and black diasporic cast at Goldsmiths initially threw the London audience into thinking of Oga’s Ark as a trans-national ‘black’ play. Discussion focused on the play’s exploration of transcultural performance – its multivalent possibilities as a play in Eastern Europe, Africa and Britain – and particularly its introduction of modes of transcultural performance from the African diaspora to a British context.

Download a poster of the event (pdf).