Cabaret

A form of entertainment featuring comedy, song, dance, and theatre, distinguished mainly by the performance venue—a restaurant or nightclub with a stage for performances and the audience sitting at tables (often dining or drinking) watching the performance being introduced by a master of ceremonies or emcee (MC).

Cabaret also refers to a Mediterranean-style brothel—a bar with tables and women who mingle with and entertain the clientele. Traditionally these establishments can also feature some form of stage entertainment, often singers and dancers.

Kabaret is the Afrikaans word for cabaret. However, while it is sometimes used in the general sense discussed above under Cabaret, it also gained a more specific, literary, meaning in South Africa, and especially in Stellenbosch and the Cape Town region, during the 1970-1985 period. At the incentive of local writers, composers and directors, led by Hennie Aucamp, it developed as a form of resistance theatre utilized by Afrikaans writers and performers, leaning heavily on the European political cabaret - notably the German cabaret or Kabarett (a form of political satire that was created at the end of the 19th century) and the theories and pracitces of Brecht and others. *** (See further Cabaret in South Africa).

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