Of place and playmaking: working with everyday city spaces through theatre and performance (original) (raw)

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. v 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 midway. For early experiments, The Braamfontein Saturday Project group, especially Jenni-Lee