Yvette Hutchison

Yvette Hutchison (19**-) Theatre researcher, historian and teacher.

Biography

Born in Durban, studied Drama and English at the University of Natal (Durban), completing an B.A. Hons degree in English Literature. In 1989 moved to the University of Stellenbosch for a Masters in English and became a teacher in the Departments of English and Drama, as well as part time teaching at the nearby University of the Western Cape. In 1999 she completed a D.Phil on African theatre at the University of Stellenbosch under the supervision of Temple Hauptfleisch with a thesis entitled Memory is a weapon: the uses of history and myth in selected post-1960 Kenyan, Nigerian and South African plays (1999), undertaking part of the research with Eckhard Breitinger at the University of Bayreuth with the help of a DAAD scholarship.

In 1999 she joined the staff of King Alfred's College, Winchester England as researcher and lecturer in drama, in 2004-5 also serving as an Associate Professor of Drama at the University of Stellenbosch.

In April 2006 she was appointed as Senior Lecturer at Warwick University, UK, and in June 2015 was promoted to Reader.

Yvette joined the department at Warwick in April 2006 where she has continued to develop her research and teaching interests focussed on theatre in the African context, particularly South Africa, and intercultural theatre practices.

She is associate editor of the South African Theatre Journal and the African Theatre series. Her Leverhulme project Performing Memory: Theatricalising identity in contemporary South Africa in 2012, culminated in her monograph South African Performance and Archives of Memory (Manchester University Press, 2013). From 2015-17 she had AHRC funding to develop mobile app technology to to create a virtual network connecting African women-identified creative practitioners with one another and other interested parties, including schools who want to widen curricula, through African Women Playwrights Network, cf. https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Community/African-Women-Playwrights-Network-837218766368787/.

Her next collaborative project with Lliane Loots of Flatfoot Dance Company, will trace the relationship between disability dance and citizenship with specific companies in various Africa countries. Her chapter, 'Unmuting citizenship – Engaging audiences with disavowed issues through physical theatre', in African Theatre 17: Contemporary Dance, which she and Nigerian scholar Chukwuma Okoye co-edited in 2018 (James Currey), is the basis for this work.

Her latest publications include the co-edited African Theatre: Contemporary Dance (James Currey, 2018), and Contemporary Plays by African Women (Methuen, 2019), articles or chapters on contemporary South African women-identified artists (2013, 2018), on 'Creating a network on and off-line, in and out of Africa' (RiDE, 2019), and various analyses of how artists and ethnographers are re-visiting European aesthetics and archives to reveal colonial afterlives that continue to resonate in the present (2015, 2019).

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Author of ** articles and chapters in books on various aspects of African and South African theatre, co-author (with Kole Omotoso) of a collection of African plays called Open Space: An Introduction to African Drama (Kagiso, 1995) and frequent reviewer for various academic journals.

Became a researcher in and later co-ordinator of the Centre for Theatre and Performance Studies and a technical editor of the South African Theatre Journal (later Assistant Editor).

Author of an article called "Contemporary Collaborators II: Magnet Theatre", published in Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer and Greg Homann (editors). The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Co-compiler and -editor (with Amy Jephta) of the collection Contemporary Plays by African Women (Methuen Drama, 2019)