Loren Kruger

Theatre, Crime and the Edgy City in Post-apartheid Johannesburg

Think of Johannesburg. . . . South of Soweto, . . . to the border of Midrand in the north. The place looks like a kidney, like a sort of squashed kidney. . . . Think of the great cities of the world. Rome, Paris, Beijing, Buenos Aires, London, New York, Johannesburg! Johannesburg is the largest city in the world not built on a river! This is why we’re mad! This is why the city is crazy! We need water! —Love, Crime, and Johannesburg (1999)2

Black Atlantics, White Indians, and Jews: Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat Dangor and Others

When Ratunya Mochi opened her eyes on the second day—still wracked with cholera and a disease of scabs on her arms and legs—she had no idea that where she lay was Africa. . . . She had barely survived a forced journey of six months from . . . a village near Hyderabad. . . . She looked into the faces of the family crowded around her, sold also into sugar slavery, . . . and murmured that she had decided to die. —Ashwin Desai, Arise Ye Coolies

The drama of country and city: tribalization, urbanization and theatre under apartheid

In an ironic reversal of the classic modern paradigm where the city represents progress and the agency of citizens against the ‘idiocy of rural life’, the Africanized city, especially Johannesburg, came in the apartheid period to signify barbarism for white South Africans, the very group that saw itself as the vanguard of modernity in Africa. Fearful of the hybrid urbanity of the ‘city native’ in Sophiatown, Afrikaner Nationalists and their English‐speaking fellow‐travellers in the 1950s proposed a counter‐civitas, a perverse modernity defined not by urban civility but by isolation in the country. This essay takes the tensions between and within the racial appropriations of country and city in apartheids perverse modernity as the point of departure for a critical revaluation of the affinities and differences among African, Afrikaans, and white English drama and performance in South Africa.

Shoo--This Book Makes Me to Think! Education, Entertainment, and "Life-Skills" Comics in South Africa

This article examines the ways comics contribute to nonformal education in contemporary South Africa, especially the Heart to Heart project, produced by the Storyteller Group, and Body and Soul, by the Soul City project. While Soul City follows the urban bias of many educational programs in its focus on urban stories and contexts, Heart to Heart is the result of a collaboration in which rural secondary school students produced and revised a graphic story using workshop performances to reenact and revise a story about lives similar to their own. The article shows how the comics critically engage with participants’ desires for the modernity and success associated with urban lifestyles as well as life skills. It also highlights Heart to Heart’s differences from many other rural culture-for-development projects elsewhere in southern Africa, including theater for development and literacy programs. It differs in its acknowledgment of the local impact of transnational cultural forms and social roles and of the appeal of texts and artifacts that represent urban success to local readers and in its effective appropriation of formal and affective features from mass-cultural entertainments like soap operas and comics for educational purposes.

White Cities, "Diamond Zulus," and the "African Contribution to Human Advancement": African Modernities and the World's Fairs

From the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, representations of Africans at the worlds fairs were often aligned with the colonial cultural logic of contrasting the savage Other with the civilized subject, illustrating the politics of modernity, racialization, and imperial conquest. Certain showcases, however, at the worlds fairs in the U.S. and South Africaas well as performances in the white urban environments of Chicago and Johannesburgundid this binary by introducing new spectacular economies depicting African modernities.

Tasks, masks and borrowed robes

(2009). Tasks, masks and borrowed robes. Scrutiny2: Vol. 14, The ‘States’ of Popular Culture, pp. 95-102.

Dancing All Over Johannesburg, South Africa—Twenty-Fourth Annual Dance Umbrella (review)

The Dance Umbrella began in 1988 in the twilight of apartheid as a showcase for original modern work in a dance field dominated by rather uneven ballet companies that were subsidized by the provincial performing arts councils until 1994. Over twentyfour years the event has grown into a vibrant and diverse program that ranges from variations on Broadway-style revues to experimental work that tackles intractable conflicts that beset South Africa and the world. At a moment when the spoken theatre is either shamelessly commercial or cautiously committed to heritage programming—in other words, to revivals of anti-apartheid classics—the best Dance Umbrella pieces offer both innovations in form and critical engagement with thorny topics, from the troubled history of the colonial wars to current controversies in the politics of class, gender, and race. In particular, by foregrounding the body in freedom and in restraint, this year’s work highlighted the visceral impact of gender politics more effectively than current spoken theatre has done.

Keywords and Contexts: Translating Theatre Theory

theatre translation must negotiate a critical tension, we might also say “drama,” between competing paradigms, but this tension is best described not, as it often is, as a contest between “faithful” and “free” or between proper translation and improper adaptation. rather, theatre translators must negotiate the contest between two imperatives, both legitimate: between effacing the work of translation in the interest of immediate communication with the local audience, and disclosing that work so as to communicate the challenge to communication posed by differences in language and culture. as harley Granville-Barker wrote in 1924, the text of a play is less an art work than a kind of score whose full meaning is realized only in performance; in this context, the imperative of communication often wins out over that of displaying the translation’s foreign origins. since changing norms of performance and spectatorship make theatre translations obscure, even incomprehensible over time, calls for fidelity to a supposedly timeless original simply make no sense. in order to produce what Granville-Barker called (in the context of French translations of shakespeare) “an equivalent effect . . . for a French audience played to by French actors to that produced by english actors upon an english audience,”2 the text must anticipate not only the linguistic codes of the target language but also the conventions governing actors and audiences in the receiving house.

The Drama of Hospitality: Performance, Migration, and Urban Renewal in Johannesburg

The agents I mention above include arts organizations Joubert Park Project and Trinity Session, as well as the public city agency Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA); their projects include Hillbrow/Dakar/Hillbrow, Pedestrian Poetry, and Welcome to our Hillbrow. Artists and activists have harnessed public and private resources in works that combine artistry and planning, play and productivity, and imaginative performance with acts of urban civility in a city that has been notorious for violent crime and a pervasive indifference to civil responsibility. These events are formal in that they choreograph particular acts and actions in specific sites, and productive in so far as artists work with planners to effect new spatial practices and reshape the urban forms that accommodate them. They are significant because they attempt to change the built environment and the social as well as aesthetic experience of participants in urban life, and to include as participants both South African citizens and migrants who live in inner-city Johannesburg. In the nearly two decades since the post-apartheid era officially began in 1994, the interventions of planners and artists have changed the former central business district (CBD) into a central administration district (CAD) made up of government, corporate, and cultural precincts.

From the Cape of Good Hope: South African Drama and Performance in the Age of Globalization

Since the official end of apartheid in 1994, almost two decades ago, theatre in South Africa has lost the prominent position it enjoyed as the site of cultural resistance to the state. Theatre in the post-apartheid era has to compete with film and television for talent as well as audience attention, and all South African cultural institutions today, as against the isolation due to boycotts against apartheid, must confront the onslaught of ready-made