ABSTRACT
This chapter situates the Izithombe 2094 project, a participatory theatre as public art work conducted in Johannesburg in 2015 and 2016, at the intersection of urban studies and theatre and performance studies. It marks concerns in the urban studies field the project serves, namely the interrelated lines of thinking around the cultural turn, the city as material and non-representational, the city as relationally emergent and the value of attending to everyday practices. It then establishes definitions for performance and performativity, theatre and theatricality, discussing how these concepts help in thinking through the urban everyday and how they endow theatre and performance as art practices to be resonant, robust tools for learning and broadcasting knowledges of daily placemaking as relational and emergent. The chapter concludes by positioning the practical and theoretical intentions of the project within the broader field of scholarship on popular culture and the urban.
