Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s main concern with how the spatial practices of theatre and performance might serve the spatial practice of daily placemaking in cities. Working between cultural geography and theatre and performance studies scholarship, the chapter positions theatre and performance as offering practical tools and conceptual lenses for understanding and learning about spaces as relational and emergent. It introduces the book’s case study, the Izithombe 2094 project, a participatory theatre-based public art work that took place in 2015/2016 in an inner city suburb in Johannesburg. The chapter provides historical and socio-economic context for the site of the work, delineates the phronetic approach as proposed by Tim Ingold, Henk Borgdorff and Bent Flyvbjerg used in the work’s process and unpacks how the specific research methods served a relationally emergent understanding of space explored through a theatre and performance lens.