ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the making of the final play component of a year-long public art project run in Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith’s Paarl in Johannesburg – a play called Izithombe 2094, performed in the public spaces of the area. The chapter starts with scholarly thinking on public art and particularly its participatory processes and how they might serve an agonistic democratic approach to space, research on space and broadcasting this research. It then turns to the specific case of Izithombe 2094, exploring how the collaborative process of playmaking both extended the theatre ensemble’s knowledge of the area’s everyday practices as well as assimilating this knowledge into a play form for sharing with the public. The chapter explores how theatre might operate as a synthetic mechanism for drawing research data together and presenting it to reflect the data’s representational and non-representational aspects, but also discusses how theatre can valuably, and with self-awareness, represent research experiences as subjective.
