Working with Everyday City Spaces Through Theatre and Performance
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OF PLACE AND PLAYMAKING: WORKING WITH EVERYDAY CITY SPACES THROUGH THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE Alexandra Halligey Town Cape of Thesis submitted for the degree of UniversityDoctor of Philosophy In the Department of Drama, Faculty of Humanities, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN NOVEMBER 2017 i The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derivedTown from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes Capeonly. of Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University ‘But communication takes place on the limit, or on the common limits where we are exposed and where it exposes us.’ (Nancy, 2008: 62) ii DEDICATION For Sara Matchett and Nicholas Dallas iii ABSTRACT OF PLACE AND PLAYMAKING: WORKING WITH EVERYDAY CITY SPACES THROUGH THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE By Alexandra Halligey This thesis proposes theatre and performance as tools for understanding the relational emergence of city spaces. It responds to two related urban studies calls. The first is for fine-grained ethnographies of the everyday to learn what city spaces might be becoming in order to strategise how to support these becomings. The second falls under the ‘cultural turn’ in urban thinking: what artistic projects might offer an everyday urbanism. Through an everyday urban lens, the work asserts the performativity of daily actions in constructing space, but also the affectual qualities that daily city life produces. These affectually charged, spatial constructions through the interrelation of daily activity are what make spaces become places, places that are temporary and always evolving. This thesis draws a link between everyday placemaking practices and the artistic practice of playmaking to propose theatre and performance as a way of learning about city spaces, actively engaging with this knowledge and broadcasting it. It argues that theatre and performance staged in the sites it seeks to know and in concert with city dwellers has the capacity to facilitate an embodied, but reflective experience of what it is to be continually implicated as a city dweller in spatial – and therefore place – construction through daily actions. The work takes as its primary focus a year-long participatory theatre and performance project run in the Johannesburg inner city suburbs of Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith’s Paarl, resulting in a ‘site-specific’ play performed in the streets of the area. The practical component to the study is contextualized within the broader landscape of Johannesburg public art interventions over the last 15 years and specifically in relation to two other Johannesburg-based participatory public art projects: Terry Kurgan’s Hotel Yeoville and a series of public art commissions managed by The Trinity Session. The research uses Tim Ingold’s notion of corresponding with materiality in order to know as a methodology in service of understanding cities through their relational construction. This phronetic approach – knowing through doing – is applied to interpreting Kurgan’s and The Trinity Session’s work and to both the making of the theatre project in Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith’s Paarl and the writing of this thesis. The study takes place at the intersection between urban studies, theatre and performance studies and public art. It draws together the socially-engaged concerns and considerations of all three fields to propose theatre and performance as a public art form offering a mode of productive, robust engagement with the contemporary urban moment. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, this project is indebted to Sara Matchett for casting me in Breathing spaces in 2005 and to Nicholas Dallas for describing and then lending me The practice of everyday life in 2009. The two happenings combined into my conceiving the project and they have informed my research process throughout. Breathing spaces was Sara’s final Master’s piece and a Mothertongue production – a cross-community professional theatre project created with ten women from Darling for the Voorkamer Fees and performed site-specifically in three of the women’s homes. Nicholas’s introduction to The practice of everyday life gave me the language to articulate what excited me about Sara’s process and how I wanted to work in a similar way in a densely-urban context. I owe many more thanks besides: Further to the Mothertongue Project for the inspiration that my continued relationship with the theatre company provides and to Sara for all our conversations since 2005, both creative and academic. Mark Fleishman and Jennie Reznek for the two years of teaching and facilitating at Magnet Theatre – like the Mothertongue Project, so inspiring as to how and why to keep making and experimenting with socially-engaged theatre and performance. My Masters colleagues and dear friends, Ariel Hall and Veronika Boekelman, for their encouragement and for sustaining our conversations across the seas and continents. Clara Vaughan, for being my steadfast study partner, full of clarity and insights and patient listening to all my manic gabbling about the latest research revelation. Tizzle Leyland, without whose support, reading and deep interest, the first half of this PhD would have been a far harder path and not nearly as fun. For her constant witnessing of the journey from start to finish: Hanneke Mackie. Linda Hathorn and Penny Morrel for beds in Cape Town and so much more besides. Lucia Walker and Sharyn West for a retreat cottage and retreat dinners. Rike Sitas for literature at the beginning and Kim Gurney for a very helpful conversation mid-way. For early experiments, The Braamfontein Saturday Project group, especially Jenni-Lee Crewe, Nondumiso Msimanga, Shameelah Kahn, Emma Brecher and Nokuthula Mkwanazi. And for further experiments, my University of Pretoria students: Anderson Barroso, Carla Classen, Joanne McQuirk and Reggie Goodwin. To Toni Morkel and Lindiwe Matshikiza for making the final play process the wonder that it was. Michael Inglis for bringing Splitbeam on board to help with technical support on Izithombe 2094 – I was so glad to unexpectedly have my old friend involved. All the women and children at Bienvenu and the 2015 and 2016 Bertrams Junior School Grade 3s and 4s. Amon Maluleke and v Refiloe Molefe at Bertrams Inner City Farm for all the stories while gardening. Rebecca Haysom and Garfield Taylor for happily letting us colonise Twilsharp during the production weeks. The Oppenheimer Memorial Trust for funding the majority of the project and the African Centre for Cities and the National Art Council contributions which made the second run of Izithombe 2094 possible. The African Centre for Cities too for awarding me one of their NRF grants which allowed me to give this research my full focus over the last three and a half years. For support and countless conversations: Juliet Jenkin, Mwenya Kabwe, Myer Taub, Jenni- Lee Crewe (again), Elizabeth Mills, Samantha and Sebastian Mansfield-Barry, Tamsyn Adams and Andrew Joseph, Gilbert Pooley, Alex Parker and Aidan Mosselson. Betony Adams for insights throughout and her incisive editorial eye and intellectual brain at the end. Baeletsi Tsatsi who is research assistant, facilitator, performer, stage manager, director and friend extraordinaire. My mother, Jennifer Halligey, for her unflagging belief. Frances Slabolepszy, whose dialogue intellectually, creatively and personally I can’t – and don’t want to - imagine living without. Mark Fleishman for his faith in my presumptuous inter-disciplinary project and Edgar Pieterse for taking me on without knowing me at all. It has been the dream of a PhD to have two such minds and hearts guiding the process. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iii ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….….iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………………………………………….v TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………………………………………..vii REFERENCING NOTE………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ix TABLE OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………………………………………x CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….......................1 Cities, Performance, Theatre, the Commons, Dissensus………………………………………………………..11 Thesis Structure………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..17 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK……………………………………………………………………………………………………..18 Urban Theory……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………18 Performance and Performativity; Theatre and Theatricality…….…………………………………………………29 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….44 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODOLOGY…………………………………………………...45 LITERATURE REVIEW………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….45 Site-specificity…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…..45 Participatory Public Art…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..….48 Participation……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……….52 Popular Culture, Identity and the City……………………………………………………………………………………….58 METHODOLOGY.……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….………64 The Practice Turn………………………………………………………………………………………………….….……68 METHODS…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……72 vii Theatre and Performance Based Workshops………………………………………………………………………………72 Playmaking……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....74 Participant-observation……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..76 Interviews………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...77 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….79