Gibson Alessandro Cima is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History in Northern Illinois University’s School of Theatre and Dance. His research interests include South African theatre and performance, theatre from the Global South, post-colonial theory, and theatre-for-social-change. He has presented and published his research on the influence of South Africa’s anti-apartheid protest theatre on post-apartheid and global stages widely. As a theatre practitioner, he has devised work addressing Georgetown University’s historical role in the institution of slavery, directed the US premiere of South African playwright Juliet Jenkin’s The Boy Who Fell From the Roof, and brought his own adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa.
Submissions
500 Icons
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
I Mumble the Body Electric,
or (i)Phone, (u)Phone : Gloss
The future is here, but it was also the past — our stages of technological understanding precede us and haunt us into our futures.
Pandemic Disco
A virus, which is a notebook and some juicy apples, dances.
A virus, which is a giant Siamese palace, dances.
A virus, which is a helicopter landing, dances.
Pandemic Disco : Gloss
The pandemic has been racialised, oft-referred to as the “Wuhan virus” and the “Chinese virus”, and anyone who passes as Chinese (or, really, of East or Southeast Asian descent) in the western world has been Othered and, in some cases, physically assaulted, violently denying them of their sense of self.
On Utopian Time : Gloss
My imagined performance is the story of what happens when these hopes do not come to fruition, triggering a paradoxical nostalgia for an idea of the future that existed in the past.
On Utopian Time
It’s a performance about parents and children, about generations and time, about a beautiful, troubled nation, about race, about a father imagining a reconciled future for his son...