PERFORMANCE, PRODUCTION AND OTHER SPATIO-TEMPORAL PRACTICES IN THE EDGY CITY

• Published in: Themes in theatre 2014-01 (8), p.85
• Main Author: Kruger, Loren
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991); Mumford, Lewis
• ISSN: 1871-8736; 1879-6060

[...]cultural agency enabled social agency (Sommer 2006). At the Johannesburg instance of the Urban Age conference organized by the London School of Economics in 2006, Peñalosa contrasted Bogota's implementation of 'transport as social justice' and 'quality of life equality' despite income inequality with Johannesburg's struggle to meet its own goals for 'world class city' status-as the city's website proclaims.3 In the last decade, city government, the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) in partnership with big capital, in the Central Johannesburg Partnership (CJP), has certainly renovated highprofile public spaces in the inner city, such as the Newtown Cultural Precinct that houses the internationally known Market Theatre, and worked on less visible spaces such as affordable housing and neighbourhood parks. Cascoland, Drill Hall, and the Joubert Park Project Cascoland in Johannesburg (2007) was the second is an short series of events staged within and with particular South African communities, beginning with Crossroads, a historic informal settlement created in the 1970s outside Cape Town (2006) and continuing with the Indian Ocean port of Durban (2008).4 Neither the Dutch organizers of Cascoland nor their local partners for this particular series in Johannesburg, the Joubert Park Project (JPP) mention Antanas Mockus and his mimes, but their own interventions, especially the representation and reclamation of pedestrian space and enunciations, appear to echo Mockus.5 More directly, their consultants and collabourators included others working on the interface between performance and social intervention, among them: [...]comments on JPP draw primarily on this correspondence and on documents on the JPP site unless otherwise cited. 6The renovations by Michael Hart and associates (documented by SharpCITY's Deckler, Graupner and Rasmuss, 2006) preserve the historic character of the Transvaal vernacular complex which was built predominantly of brick with a corrugated iron roof painted a characteristic red, while opening up spaces leading to the central parade ground to direct the bright Highveld sun through glass curtain walls into the Point Blank Gallery 'Formerly a model apartheid institution (Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit) in close geographical and ideological proximity to the South African Broadcasting Corporation in the near-northwestern district of Auckland Park, the University of Johannesburg in collaboration with its partners at the Wits Technikon and