Marié-Heleen Coetzee

The question thus arises as to how theatrical interpretation/reinterpretation of cultural fighting arts can be approached to circumvent the above mentioned challenges. This paper proposes Laban Movement Studies (LMS) as a potentially cross-culturally viable approach to the theatrical interpretation/reinterpretation of fighting arts, in specific Zulu stick fighting.

Many ‘Western’ countries are historically associated with the violation and exploitation of indigenous cultures in service of nationalism, ‘civilization’ or other mechanisms of power. History, economics and the operations of power makes processes of interpretation/reinterpretation fraught with challenges such as avoiding cultural appropriation/exploitation and neo-colonialist impositions when adapting a culturally specific fighting art for theatrical purposes.

Theatrical combat techniques have been developed for numerous forms of warfare and fighting arts across the globe. This necessarily involves interpretation and re-interpretation of not only the fighting arts per se, but also an awareness of the associated cultural, performative and contextual conventions of the fighting arts. However, this process of interpretation/

re-interpretation of an existing fighting style from its source context to suit the demands of a target context does not occur on ‘neutral grounds’ - especially if interpretations are situated around non-Western fighting arts.