Multicultural Festival Performance as a Site of Liberation from Performance Dichotomy : Investigating Allegations

This paper explores the artistic and aesthetic means of disrupting existent performance ideologies in Zimbabwe. It looks into the ways in which festival performance is beneficial through its creation of a platform that cuts across various performance traditions in Zimbabwe. With special reference to the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) as a multicultural festival, this paper identifies how the production of Allegations (2009) allows different forms of performance traditions to thrive. It emanates from the realization that, performance in Zimbabwe has been occurring separately with racial binaries marring the performance industry. Through the use of Resistance and Performance theories, I highlight how HIFA through Allegations, discards reduplication of separation by allowing both indigenous and foreign performance traditions to exist in the same performance space