The Power of Performance: Linking Past and Present in Hananwa and Lobedu Oral Literature

In The Power of Performance, Annekie Joubert uncompromisingly challenges the textmaker's biggest problem, namely to understand the limitation of print as a receptor medium for performance. She re-examines the problems facing the textmaker in transforming a performance event to a transcribed text without losing visual and auditive aspects of performance events. With her multimedia approach she has affirmed the fact that multimedia recordings of performance events become irreplaceable instruments in the documentation and preservation of oral art. In her analysis, the author uses a collection of invaluable data pertaining to Hananwa and Lobedu oral art, history and culture that has never been filmed, recorded or published before. In The Power of Performance, the author has combined literary, linguistic, cultural, and historical insight to link performers in context, with their past and present through the power of performance. The author engages with her display, discussion and interpretation of performance-directed texts into a total process of transmitting life in a given culture.