Imagine making the kind of theatre that takes place in small rural towns in South Africa, where theatre and performance are not afforded much value. At the heart of this work is an exploration of what it means to synergise ‘mainstream’ and ‘community’ theatre in rural South African contexts; it is a theatre that seeks to blur these historical, geographic, and theoretical divides.

The kind of theatre I would like to make views ‘community’ theatre not as lesser and inferior, but as vital in its own right. It does not conform to ‘mainstream’ theatre norms and traditions that are typically defined by the spaces and geographic locations in which theatre is performed; it does not necessarily rely on theatre buildings and geographic locations that are more easily accessed by those who have transport and are able to afford the price of a theatre ticket. ‘Community’ theatre is performed in townships in non-formal spaces such as church halls, market places, taxi ranks, and the like. The architecture of the space thus often allows for and encourages active physical audience engagement.

What if we maintain that the power relationships between actors and audience are fluid and interchangeable? What if we posit that ‘mainstream’ theatre primarily emphasizes the role of the individual actor, the playwright and the director, as opposed to ‘community’ theatre’s emphasis on creative collaborators? And we see these as values rather than detriments?

What if we endeavor to realise a model that embraces both under the umbrella of theatre and performance?

Imagine a cross-community professional theatre:

• Site-specific theatre that involves working with people from different communities within small rural towns.
• Professional artists work alongside ‘non-proffessional’ community artists (artists who do not necessarily make a living out of performance).
• Community members are involved in the process as well as in the performance. It is cross-community in that theatre and performance provide a framework for conversations between different communities. These conversations occur during the creation process as well as during the performance.

Concomitant to this, is an interest in investigating what happens when memories contained within physical spaces and structures encounter external memories within particular spaces. For example, when memories of neighbours and the surrounding homes, converge with memories contained in the performed story, when geographical and psycho-emotional landscapes converge or collide.

The kind of theatre I would like to see being made is not about master, single narratives, official memory, or the structured geographies of town, house, and work/economic space. Rather, it engages psycho-emotional landscapes, conversations, personal stories, embodied memories, communities, home and domestic spaces.

This theatre informs the structure of the town; it permeates the geographic memory of the place.

Multiple experiences, memories and stories are exchanged between, and within, different communities.

Through site specific theatre and performance, I imagine embodied memories and personal stories are able to emerge and begin dissolving collective or official memory.

[1] Typically the price of a ticket to a theatre production in a ‘mainstream’ theatre house in South Africa, cost between 50 and 200 Rand, depending on where it fell on the graph that delineated ‘mainstream’ from ‘community’.

[2] In South Africa, township refers to the urban living areas that, during Apartheid, were reserved for non-white South Africans. They were built on the periphery of towns and cities. Townships still exist in South Africa, post-Apartheid.

Since my inception (at the university) my motive for being an artist has always been a socio-political one — it was not to be a super star in television soapies, or to be famous, but to go back to my community and use creative arts as a transformative tool for the people. This seed was planted long before my professional encounter with theatre and my formal training; it was planted in high school arts and cultural activities where the use of arts was simple: for the mobilization, conscientization, and politicization of the students and the community at large. After my graduation, and after three years of acting training based on an individual approach, I resuscitated that original driving motive of theatre.

I was first reminded of what is art in society and what is society in art, what is its purpose and the aesthetic that supports that purpose. I then imagined myself in the past: a couple of decades ago, just graduated from various life experiences, formalized and informal institutions, from interactions of various philosophies and pedagogues of creatives arts and theatre, all mixed up with the fast beating heart of cultural aesthetics that is subconsciously embedded deep in my African being and can only be accessed by metaphors and in fragmentation of incidence, representations, and presentations.

These are the stories from my grandmother and mother, these are my poems, metaphors and idioms from my father, they are the smells, and tastes that remind me of home, and their absence in any form of engagement stimulates homesickness. I need them to understand my world.