Artist's Statement

 

I started the Bertrams Stories Project in October 2015 as part of my doctoral research into how drama and theatre might be useful tools for discovering knowledges of everyday life in relation to the built environment. For my methodology I draw on Tim Ingold’s notion of ‘working with’ the materiality of the world in order to find ways of corresponding with it. Ingold proposes that knowledge is neither predetermined nor extracted but rather emerges through the relationship between things. In order to know you must get involved with relating; you must engage in correspondence.

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Over the last ten months I have used a variety of ways to initiate a correspondence with the Bertrams, Lorentzville, Judith’s Paarl area: participatory drama workshops with four different institutions (Bertrams Junior School, Bienvenu Refugee Shelter for Women and Children, Gerald Fitzpatrick House for senior citizens and Maurice Freeman Recreation Centre); interviews with people from these institutions, people on the street, people who have some kind of connection to the area, local business people and traders; volunteering at Bambanani Organic Vegetable Garden; hiring a studio in the area; walking the streets. The latest phase is a playmaking process to create a piece of theatre as public art to be performed in the public spaces of the area, offering something of a reflection on its contemporary moment. Working with three professional theatremakers, my intention has been both to assimilate the findings, ‘the correspondence’, of the last ten months into a theatrical form and to further this correspondence through the play devising process. The playmaking process has involved ongoing work with participant groups and offering the cast a series of prompts and tasks to engage with the area – its landscape, objects, its people and the relationship between all three of these that make this particular part of Johannesburg what it is.  The resulting play is to be a walking tour through the streets and public spaces of Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith’s Paarl, led by two of the professional theatremakers as tour guide characters/storytellers/provocateurs, and with installations and performances by local participants along the way.

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Geographer Doreen Massey argues for space as a ‘multiplicity of stories-so-far’. My intention with the Bertrams Stories Project has been to hear and see and respond in turn, in a variety of ways, to some of the stories that make this suburb just east of Johannesburg’s city centre what it is today. Izithombe 2094 is a theatrical moment coming out of the last ten months’ work and offered in response to this particular point in the ongoing, multiplicitous storying of Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith’s Paarl.

- Alex Halligey