Theatre and Dance professor Gibson Cima on protest theater and his research in South Africa
Gibson Cima is assistant professor of theater history and head of theatre studies in the NIU School of Theatre and Dance. For several years he has traveled to South Africa to study and research South African Theatre. Cima is presenting the lecture, Future Nostalgias” focused on South African anti-apartheid protest theatre on the post-apartheid stage, Thursday, October 10 at 5:10 p.m. at the NIU Art Museum in Altgeld Hall room 125.
Cima talked to the NIU Arts Blog about his three-week research trip to South Africa this past summer.
Gibson Cima, assistant professor of theater history and head of theater studies
I’ve been studying South African theatre since 2006 when I first went visited the country to research Athol Fugard. Fugard is a white South African playwright who collaborated with black actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona during apartheid under very difficult circumstances when it was illegal for them to be in the same room together. Despite these constraints, they made theatre that traveled all over the world and raised awareness about the terrible situation in South Africa under apartheid, a legally sanctioned system of racial oppression that existed from 1948 to 1994.
