Participatory Theatre and the Urban Everyday in South Africa

Place and Play in Johannesburg

Alexandra Halligey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000769739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This book explores theatre and performance as participatory research practices for exploring the everyday of the city.

Taking an inner-city suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa as its central case study, the book considers how theatre and performance might be both useful practical tools in considering the everyday city, as well as conceptual lenses for understanding it. The author establishes an understanding of space as ever evolving and formed through the ongoing relationship between things, human and non-human, and considers how theatre and performance offer useful paradigms for learning about and working with city spaces. As ephemeral, embodied, material artistic practices, theatre and performance mirror the nature of everyday life. The book discusses theatre and performance games and placemaking processes as offering valuable ways of discovering daily acts of place-making and providing insights that more conventional research methods may not allow. Yet the book also considers how seeing daily city life as a kind of performance, a kind of theatre in its own right, helps to further understandings of city spaces as ever evolving through complex webs of relationships.

This book will be of interest to academics, academic practitioners and post-graduate students in the fields of theatre and performance studies, urban studies and cultural geography.

1 Introduction

The subject of this book is the intersection between playmaking and placemaking, with space, the ongoing material construction of space, as critical to both. It takes as its case study a participatory theatre and performance-based public art project I conceived of and facilitated in the Johannesburg inner city suburbs of Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith’s Paarl¹ as part of my PhD research. The project consisted of weekly participatory theatre and performance-based workshops run with the residents/learners of local institutions from the August of 2015 to December 2016. From July 2016, I worked with a small cast of professional actors alongside participants from the workshops to make a site-specific play modelled on the format of a walking tour with fictional tour guide characters and short, self-contained performances along the way. The play was entitled Izithombe 2094 (which translates from the isiZulu as ‘Pictures of 2094’, 2094 being the area’s postcode) and was performed publicly in the first week of September 2016 and again in the first week of November 2016. This book analyses the process of the project to understand the ways in which theatre and performance might be useful to understanding the everyday placemaking of a city.

The Izithombe 2094 project² was an interdisciplinary one. I conducted the research across two departments at the University of Cape Town: the Drama Department (now called the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies) and the African Centre for Cities, an urban studies think tank housed within the Engineering and Built Environment Faculty, though formed in collaboration with the Science and Humanities Faculties. This institutional confluence reflects the two primary, intersecting concerns of the Izithombe 2094 project and this book: the spatial practice of human settlements and the spatial practice of theatre, both inflected by a socially engaged ethos: how might we draw our attention to living fully, robustly, sustainably in relation to fellow humans, things, land, elements? How might we be active in marking and potentially supporting the ways in which this is happening in our world/s and productively problematising the ways in which full, robust, sustainable relational living is being hampered?

Space and place

This section considers what is at stake in geographic, urban terms to understandings of space and spatial practice, but quickly threads these into similar concerns in theatre and performance studies. The threading of the two fields together is the essential move throughout the book to find the correlations and resonances between urban geographic considerations and theatre and performance ones.³

Talking of African cities AbdouMaliq Simone seeks to understand, ‘how researchers, policymakers, and urban activists can practice ways of seeing and engaging urban spaces that are characterised simultaneously by regularity and provisionality’ (Simone, 2008: 69). Doreen Massey in her more global discussion of space, posits:

… if identities, both specifically spatial and otherwise, are indeed constructed relationally then that poses the question of the geography of those relations of construction. It raises questions of the politics of those geographies and of our relationship to and responsibility for them; and it raises conversely and perhaps less expectedly, the potential geographies of our social responsibility.

(Massey, 2005: 10)

How might theatre and performance be put to work as participatory public art processes to engage with geographies of relationally constructed space and the geographies of social responsibility that engagement raises?

This book applies a conceptual lens of performance and performativity to Massey’s geographic ends. To conceive of our relational actions as performance is to acknowledge that they are embodied and processual – physical, material acts taking place through time – and that they are also performative, they have an effect on the world. ‘[I]dentities … spatial or otherwise’ are made through relational actions in the form of our daily performances and their effects. But the book also asks what the practice of theatre and theatricality conceived as public art might offer a politics of urban space. What are the potential performative effects of a theatrical, socially engaged public art practice in city spaces?

What do I mean by space and how does this differ from place? Massey starts her argument in For Space with the following assertion: ‘And what if we refuse that distinction … between place (as meaningful, lived and everyday) and space (as what? the outside? the abstract? the meaningless)?’ (Massey, 2005: 130). Michel de Certeau in contrast describes place as lost to the city, but recuperated through ‘spatial practice’, through travel, movement, action through the city which makes space (1988: 103–107, my emphasis). De Certeau’s conception of space is far from meaningless, but rather prioritises a formation in the moment through practice. Place for de Certeau is resolved into static palimpsests (109). Place is origin (103). Place is fixed and only activated by spatial practice, spatial practice which is alive only in the moment and in the motion of action (109).

Similarly to de Certeau, Massey proposes an active, ongoing production of space, but unlike him, she carries the idea of relational construction through to place. Place for Massey is not fixed origin, rather she argues:

If space is … a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometrics of space. Their character will be a product of these intersections within that wider setting, and of what is made of them. And, too, of the non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions. All this contributes to the specificity of place.

(Massey, 2005: 130)

In this book I draw most significantly on Massey’s definition of place where the ‘multiplicity of stories-so-far’ that continually make space, might agglomerate into ‘spatio-temporal events’ of place (Massey, 2005: 130). Place, for the purposes of this analysis, is a moment in space and time that might be named or sensed, provisionally and with an awareness of all that is excluded in the making of that moment and its naming. Place is a glancing identity that is complex and quickly shifting out of its identifying moment. Places are not ‘points or areas on maps, but … integrations of space and time’ (Massey, 2005: 130). These events of integration are akin to the ‘something’ Kathleen Stewart describes which ‘throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation; a something both animated and inhabitable’ (2007: 1, emphasis in original). Emergent space and its fleeting, mobile resolutions into place are real, material, inhabitable, but not necessarily locatable either on a map or topographically. Or certainly an area on a map or a topographic area in the world are only two of the many stories-so-far of space that collect to make place.

Place in the terms above fits into Tim Cresswell’s definition, where:

Place is also a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world. When we look at the world as a world of places we see different things. We see attachments and connections between people and place. We see worlds of meaning and experience … the world as a rich and complicated interplay of people and the environment.

(2004: 11)

In theatre and performance studies terms, performance is similarly offered as a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world, and of feeling it too. Mark Fleishman suggests:

that there are certain epistemological issues that can only be addressed in and through performance itself and that such performance practice ‘can be both a form of research and a legitimate way of making the findings of such research publicly available’

(2012: 28, citing Painter, 1996: n.p.)

Fleishman is speaking of artistic performance, but Dwight Conquergood argues for considering ethnography as a performance to emphasise a ‘way of knowing that is grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connection: “knowing how,” and “knowing who”’ (2002: 146). Performance in Conquergood’s sense here is that of process – the kind of everyday space-making performances that collect or are ‘thrown together’ (Stewart, 2007: 1) to make a transitory sense of place.

In this book I explore a correlation between playmaking and placemaking as collaborative, iterative, material, emergent and affectual practices that make the work of playmaking a fitting way of exploring the work of daily placemaking. For the same reasons the form of a play as public art might offer itself as an allusive communicator for the findings of research on place as ‘a rich and complicated interplay of people and the environment’ (Cresswell, 2004: 11). As Brian Massumi suggests, proprioception is our primary means for wayfinding and inhabiting space. We know where we are and where we are going through sensing, rather than seeing and mapping fixed points, so that ‘position emerges from movement, from a relation to movement itself’ (Massumi, 2002: 180). This line of thinking is particularly useful in relating the physically relational, creative spatial practice of theatre making to the physically relational, creative spatial practices of daily placemaking.

In foundational urban studies, spatial analysis terms the concerns of this book are Lefebvrian ones. Lefebvre demands an attention to practice in order to understand the ongoing, active construction of space. He argues that it is in practice and the history of practices that ‘knowledge’ of space emerges, suggesting that more purely theoretical approaches to documenting space finally provide only ‘descriptions’ or ‘inventories’ of space (1991b: 7, emphasis in original). He distinguishes between knowledge which serves power (this he nominates ‘savoir’) and knowledge which refuses to acknowledge power (this he nominates ‘connaissance’). Connaissance he sees as contained in and expressed through daily practices and it is here that his investment lies (10).

In Rhythmanalysis, he proposes a means for working with the complex interrelations of practices which make space. Space by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, as for Massey (and as Massey is influenced by Lefbevre), is formed through patterns of intersecting mobilities (Massey, 2005; Lefebvre, 2004). Our ongoing practices and the ongoing trajectories of objects, land masses, nature, the heavens, create these patterns of intersecting mobilities. This book attempts to bring attention to the knowledges contained in our daily practices, offering theatre and performance as an apt tool and conceptual lens for doing so. I take connaissance as the starting point for getting into the interstices of the everyday as ‘simultaneously the site of, the theatre for, and what is at stake in a conflict between great indestructible rhythms and the processes imposed by the socio-economic organisation of production, consumption, circulation and habitat’ (2004: 73). In what follows, Lefebvre becomes a fleeting reference, although recurring thread. I have chosen to focus on the work of later scholars, in particular Massey and Tim Ingold (2000, 2007, 2011a, 2011b, 2013), for their perhaps more immediately practical though no less poetic thinking around spatial production and what it means for placemaking. Nonetheless, this work is foundationally about the ‘production of space’ and how theatre and performance might be aptly fitting tools for giving spatial production the kind of attention prescribed by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (1991b, 2004).

Site-specificity

Chapters 3 and 4 discuss theatre and performance processes, actions and games as they engaged the spatial practice of everyday life in Bertrams through the Izithombe 2094 project workshops. Although the spatial dialogue of these workshops had some relation to site-specific theatre and performance practice and theory, it was the final play component of the project discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 that was more strictly ‘site-specific’. I consider here briefly the concepts of site-specificity which the final play, Izithombe 2094 (from which the project as a whole takes its name) engaged through its making and in being performed in the streets of Bertrams.

Putting theatre and performance in ‘real life’ sites outside of designated theatre spaces is not a new concept. Even more significantly the ideological intentions behind making the spatial practice of theatre work with the spatial practice of everyday sites has been rigorously exercised and theorised by practitioners and scholars worldwide. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks define site-specific performances as, ‘mounted within and conditioned by the particulars of found spaces, existing social situations or locations, both used and disused’ (2001: 23). As Joanne Tompkins asserts, Pearson and Shanks champion the view that ‘the interrelationship between site and performance’ is integral to the valu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Considering the fields
• 3 Making space to play
• 4 What the workshops revealed
• 5 The event of the play
• Intermezzo: Izithombe 2094
• 6 Playing the event again and again
• Afterword
• Index