Trends in Twenty-First Century African Theatre and Performance is a collection of regionally focused articles on African theatre and performance. The volume provides a broad exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance and considers the directions they are taking in the 21st Century. It contains sections on current trends in theatre and performance studies, on applied/community theatre and on playwrights. The chapters have evolved out of a working group process, in which papers were submitted to peer-group scrutiny over a period of four years, at four international conferences. The book will be particularly useful as a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in non-western theatre and performance (where this includes African theatre and performance), and would be a very useful resource for theatre scholars and anyone interested in African performance forms and cultures.

Decolonisation can be pursued in different ways. After many years of developing a critical language to engage coloniality, the most urgent need in African theatre is to develop new theories and methods in our manufactories. This Element uses Afroscenology as a theory to read and comment on African theatre. The Element particularly focuses on the history of laboratories in which it was tested and emerged, the historicization of rombic theatre and the crafting of a theory of the playtext which has been named theatric theory to distinguish it from the Aristotelian dramatic theory. The second dimension of the theory is the performatic technique. This Element also explain Afrosonic mime through examples drawn from the workshops conducted in training performers.

This book is part of a three-volume book-set published under the general title of Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre. Each of the three books in the set has a unique subtitle that works to better focus its content and differentiates it from the other two volumes. The contributors’ backgrounds and global spread adequately reflect the international focus of the three books that make up the collection. The contributions, in their various ways, demonstrate the many advances and ingenious solutions adopted by African theatre practitioners in tackling some of the challenges arising from the adverse colonial experience, as well as the “one-sided” advance of globalisation. The contributions attest to the thriving nature of African theatre and performance, which in the face of these challenges, has managed to retain its distinctiveness, while at the same time acknowledging, contesting, and appropriating influences from elsewhere into an aesthetic that is identifiably African. Consequently, the three books are presented as a comprehensive exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance, both on the continent and diaspora. Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 2: Innovation, Creativity and Social Change contains essays that address performativity as a process, particularly in the context of theatre’s engagement with contemporary realities with the hope of instigating social change. The innovativeness of the examples explored within the book points to the ingenuity and adaptive capacity of African theatre in ways that engage indigenous forms in the service of contemporary realities. Contributions in Innovation, Creativity and Social Change explore forms such as Theatre for Development, community and applied theatre, and indigenous juridical performances, as well as the work of contemporary dramatists and performers who set out to instigate change in society.

Ten new short plays by African women tackling taboo topics on identity, gender, sexualities, family relations and power. Following the international success of Contemporary Plays by African Women, this new collection is the next step in the African Women Playwright Network (AWPN) both showcasing and encouraging the development of new work. Consisting of the ten winners of the AWPN's international writing competition, this collection is centered around the theme of 'Tackling Taboo Topics in African Female Writing', originally performed as staged readings at the AWPN Festival hosted by the University of Ghana in 2022. Selected from 75 submissions from nine African countries, these plays speak to contemporary and pressing issues, illuminating lived experiences of African women that are common but seldom discussed. An important resource for schools and universities looking to diversify and decolonise curricula and engage with short works for practical classes, performances and auditions from a range of various cultures, Gendering Taboos is also an invaluable tool for programmers looking for new work and scholars working specifically in areas of gender and dramatic criticism.

Ten new short plays by African women tackling taboo topics on identity, gender, sexualities, family relations and power. Following the international success of Contemporary Plays by African Women, this new collection is the next step in the African Women Playwright Network (AWPN) both showcasing and encouraging the development of new work. Consisting of the ten winners of the AWPN's international writing competition, this collection is centered around the theme of 'Tackling Taboo Topics in African Female Writing', originally performed as staged readings at the AWPN Festival hosted by the University of Ghana in 2022. Selected from 75 submissions from nine African countries, these plays speak to contemporary and pressing issues, illuminating lived experiences of African women that are common but seldom discussed. An important resource for schools and universities looking to diversify and decolonise curricula and engage with short works for practical classes, performances and auditions from a range of various cultures, Gendering Taboos is also an invaluable tool for programmers looking for new work and scholars working specifically in areas of gender and dramatic criticism.

Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa focuses on a body of performance work, the work of Magnet Theatre in particular but also work by other artists in Cape Town and other parts of the continent or the world, that engages with the Cape as a real or imagined node in a complex system of migration and mobility. Located at the foot of the African continent, lodged between two oceans at the intersection of many of the earth's major shipping lanes, Cape Town is a stage for a powerful mixing of cultures and peoples and has been an important node in a network of flows, circuits of movement and exchange. The performance works studied here attempt to get to grips with what it feels like to be on the move and in the spaces in-between that characterises the lives, now and for centuries before, of multiple peoples who move around and pass through places like the Cape. The contributors are a broad range of mostly African authors from various parts of the continent and as such the book offers an insight into new thinking and new approaches from an emerging and important location.

This collection in part examines the legacy of the consummate Nigerian stage artist and scholar, Esiaba Irobi (1960–2010). Poems, tributes, and studies cele¬brate Irobi’s significance as actor, play¬wright, director, poet, and theatre theorist. Irobi’s life, temper, times, and career are inextricably linked to the history, devel¬opment, concerns, and uses of drama and theatre in Africa. The contributions high¬light the evolution of autochthonous thea¬trical practices: the interaction between Western and indigenous African perfor¬mance traditions; colonial/postcolonial government policies and the mutations of drama and theatre (and critical commen¬tary); the tensions inherent in postcolonial conceptions of history, identity, nation¬hood, and articulations of alternative aes¬thetics, pedagogies, and epistemologies for postcolonial African theatre; staging African plays in the West; and the con-stituencies of the contemporary African playwright and director. The strength of these studies derives primarily from nuanced examinations of the concerns and careers of particular African playwrights; the history, offerings, and fortunes of particular theatrical arenas, and close explorations of specific performances and texts. The foregrounding of correspon¬dences in the dramaturgies and intellec¬tual ferment of the continent critically accentuates equally privileged regional, historical, and other crucial specificities. Situated in time and place while under¬scoring the political and intellectual inter¬sections of a shared history of colonial-ism, the contributions to Syncretic Arenas, individually and collectively, reveal the transformations and growing strengths of postcolonialism as an analytical strategy. Isidore Diala is Professor of African literature in the Department of English and Literary Studies at Abia State University, Uturu, and author of Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Postcolony: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance (2013).