The camera, the film, the television and globalization have finished the work the Realists, the Naturalists and Konstantin Stanislavski began. Whereas, for millennia, African art was ideologically non-Realist, realism – one might say, Western realism – has swept the board. I say ‘ideologically’, perhaps the better word is ‘aesthetically’. There were artists who believed that capturing a likeness was worth it, but these were relatively few and far between. The idea of art – hence ‘ideologically’ – for most artists was not to copy. Verisimilitude was not a goal. What was the point? Art was art and reality was reality – two different things. For the artist, the imagination rather than observation was paramount. African artists sought to express the symbolic, the spiritual, the decorative or the usefulness of their subjects. Theatre artists over the ages and in different parts of the world have sought the truth but there are many kinds of truth and therefore many ways in which theatre artists have expressed it. There can’t be many artists who do not strive to be truthful – though religion, politics and capitalism have their fair share of those who don’t – and these have shown that realism has no monopoly of the truth. Africans are now so acculturated that many no longer understand artistic non-real expression and when confronted by it either show no interest or search for ways to reconcile it with their realist expectations. Nevertheless, in the present time, it is the theatre, along with sculpture and visual art, that is still rooted in the origins of African art. African non-realism thrives in the theatres of Africa and nowhere more than in South Africa. Though this is so, i.e., that indigenous theatre in South Africa, to a large extent, creates its spectacles in the spirit of African realism, the universities, it would seem, still tend to teach most aspects of performance according to the gospels of European and North American realism. This phenomenon might not be entirely restricted to South Africa, though, owing to the hegemony of Western culture in South Africa, it is probably a lot more entrenched there than elsewhere. There are those who, in the spirit of decolonizing the university syllabus, are giving this anomaly serious attention. In the interests of theatre, their efforts deserve to be supported.

摄影机、电影、电视和全球化已经完成了现实主义者、自然主义者和康斯坦丁·斯坦尼斯拉夫斯基开始的工作。几千年来，非洲艺术在意识形态上都是非现实主义的，而现实主义——有人可能会说，西方现实主义——已经席卷了整个市场。我说'意识形态'，也许更好的词是'美学'。有_相信捕捉肖像是值得的艺术家，但这些艺术家相对较少而且相差甚远。对于大多数艺术家来说，艺术的概念——因此是“意识形态的”——不是复制。逼真度不是目标。重点是什么？艺术是艺术，现实是现实——两种不同的东西。对于艺术家来说，想象力比观察更重要。非洲艺术家试图表达其主题的象征性、精神性、装饰性或实用性。古往今来，世界各地的戏剧艺术家都在寻求真理，但真理有很多种，因此戏剧艺术家表达真理的方式也有很多种。没有多少艺术家不努力做到真实——尽管宗教，政治和资本主义在那些不这样做的人中占有相当的份额——这些都表明现实主义并没有垄断真理。非洲人现在如此适应文化，以至于许多人不再理解艺术的非真实表达，当面对它时要么表现出不感兴趣，要么寻找方法将其与他们的现实主义期望相协调。然而，在当今时代，戏剧以及雕塑和视觉艺术仍然植根于非洲艺术的起源。非洲的非现实主义在非洲的剧院中盛行，在南非最为盛行。尽管情况确实如此，也就是说，南非的本土剧院在很大程度上以非洲现实主义的精神创造了奇观，但大学似乎，仍然倾向于根据欧洲和北美现实主义的福音来教授表演的大部分方面。这种现象可能并不完全局限于南非，但由于西方文化在南非的霸权，它在那里可能比其他地方更加根深蒂固。有些人本着大学教学大纲非殖民化的精神，正在认真关注这一异常现象。为了剧院的利益，他们的努力应该得到支持。