Yixuan Su
Yixuan Su, born in China, is studying at the College of Education, Zhejiang University with the major in Curriculum and Teaching Methodology as a PhD candidate. She achieved her Master of Arts Degree at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and her Bachelor of Literature Degree in Nanjing University. Also, she studied in University of California, Berkeley in 2015 as an exchange student. After graduating from UIUC, she worked in Jiangsu Second Normal College as an academic secretary and a consultant in Chaoming Theatre, which is a campus theatre based in the School of Liberal Arts. After three years of work experience that led her to think about her identity as a teacher and as a theatre worker, she returned to university in 2021 and began her research in educational drama.
With an educational background in literature, theatre and education, Yixuan is not only concerned with the history of DiE and TiE, the revolution of practices with respect to equity, diversity, and inclusion, but also the value of drama in curriculum today. In China, the new curriculum standards for art education in primary and secondary school have just been circulated, thus she hopes to explore the role and function of drama in China's school curriculum.
Zuko Wonderfull Sikhafungana
Zuko Wonderfull Sikhafungana born in Matatiele, Eastern Cape is a Ph.D. Anthropology student at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), a fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) and artist in residence at the Factory of the Arts. He has also studied in the Netherlands in Leiden University as an exchange student. Zuko is a theatre maker, playwright, director, filmmaker, cofounder and artistic director of Back Stage Theatre Production (BSTP) a theatre company which is based in Strand, Lwandle township. His research field of interest lies within the margins of ‘community’ and mainstream theatre.
His MA dissertation focused on ways in which black theatre artists from marginalized disadvantaged communities with and without formal training negotiate themselves within theatre spaces in Cape Town. Attempting to demonstrate how works of art that awkwardly sit with labels such as “community” or “mainstream” theatre are emerging more and more in the Cape Town theatre scene. Through outreach initiatives in the city—the Zabalaza Theatre Festival, the Magnet Theatre Culture Gangs, the Full Time Training and the Job Creation Programme—that are offering opportunities to artists that are excluded from the mainstream theatre industry, providing channels and platforms that bring community theatre outside of the township space. His work highlights how community theatre artists are reclaiming and redefining what it means to practice theatre today inside and outside the townships.
His intention is to extend his work to the national scale to assess the state of contemporary post-apartheid theatre in South Africa.