Miranda Young-Jahangeer

Bringing in to play : investigating the appropriation of Prison Theatre in Westville Female Prison, KwaZulu-Natal (2000 - 2004)

Prison Theatre exists globally as a marginalised discourse defined alone by the space that it occupies rather than by any aesthetic or philosophical unity (Thompson 1998) apart from a broad belief that theatre can have a positive effect on the lives of individuals. In South Africa Prison Theatre is an emerging new area of theatrical intervention made possible primarily by the post-apartheid shift towards rehabilitation within Correctional Services.

A cell called home: Reflections on the politics of containment and emancipation in Westville Female Correctional Centre

abstract The containment of women is a concept well understood within feminist discourse (Friedan, 1963; Evans, 1979; hooks, 1984; Poirot, 2010). ‘Space’, therefore in its physical, political-economic, psychosocial and ideological/ intellectual (Ramphele, 1993) manifestations is typically implicated in the limiting of womens mobility and thus their freedom. However, 14 years of facilitating popular participatory theatre projects (PPT) (Mda, 1993; Kamlongera, 1988) in a South African Female Correctional Centre has demonstrated the power of this form to engage “the various dimensions of space” (Ramphele, 1993:2) in a way that is potentially transformative and at times liberatory for participants. This article will explore, through the structure of Mamphele Rampheles delineations of space, the politics of containment (political and spatial) and the possibilities for emancipation, as they exist for women in Westville Female Correctional Centre.

LIVING with the virus inside: Women and HIV/AIDS in prison

abstract In 2002 the women of Westville Female Correctional Centre (WFCC) used popular participatory theatre (PPT) (Mda, 1993; Kerr, 1995) to voice their concern with the state of the womens health in the facility and how the ill were being treated. This Profile documents the evolution of these two interconnected factors (policy and attitudes) in WFCC over the last decade. The evidence is based on research conducted through participant observation and through the words of a HIV-positive offender serving her sentence at Westville Female, Lilly. It is the position of this researcher and Lilly, who has been co-facilitator in numerous interventions since 2000, that PPT has been one of the primary ways in which consciousness around the disease was raised in the Centre. Of the 18 interventions that have been staged at the Correctional Centre, HIV/AIDS has been the issue that offenders most often have wanted to engage; this points to the proliferation of the disease amongst the offender population estimated at some 45.3% of incarcerated women (Goyer, 2003:30). It has also meant that awareness around this disease has been significantly increased amongst offenders and staff. Lilly speaks to this point but also offers an account of what it is like to be HIV-positive in prison and what policies and processes are in place for support.

Acting Out HIV/AIDS Behind Bars: The Appropriation of Theatre for Social Change in the Renegotiation of Behaviours Around HIV/AIDS

Equidistant from one of Durban’s most prestigious suburbs, Westville – to the North; and the highly politicised land that is now the informal settlement, Cato Manor – to the South, lies Westville Correctional Facility. To the East, the Correctional Centre is mirrored, in a bizarre postmodern twist, by the enormous homage to consumer capitalism ‘the Westville Pavilion’ (shopping centre), known affectionately as ‘The Pav’. Architectural studies (Slessor, 1995) have noted uncanny structural similarities between the Correctional Centre and the shopping mall.

A Luta Continua: a responsive intervention in Warwick Triangle Durban

The story of this site-responsive (Kwon 2004) intervention A Luta Continua is one without a beginning and without an end - or at least beginnings and ending are of no concern to us here. We jumped into the river of existing energies and found in a hidden tributary a call that deserved a response. This call came in the form of a charcoal sketch by renowned French artist Ernest Pignon (http://www.pignon-ernest.com/).

Editorial: “ Decolonising Shakespeare ?” contestations and re-imaginings for a post-liberation South Africa

In 2015 South Africans experienced a seminal moment in student politics and social movements, as previously marginalised discourses around the renewed call for Afrocentrism and the decolonisation of institutions, knowledge practices and public discourse gained new prominence. It began with the toppling of Rhodes iconography at the University of Cape Town, which quickly led to the pulling down and defacing of colonial statues situated on other South African university campuses and in South African city squares.1 The #RhodesMustFall movement saw university students and state police go head to head in ways that were reminiscent of June 16 and the anti-apartheid student uprisings in 1976. This 2015 movement evolved into the 2016 #FeesMustFall campaign which prompted the shutdown of university campuses across the country. Campuses had become war zones. Invoking the 1994 era political promises of free education, students called on institutions of higher learning to re-think, reimagine and revise outdated colonial systems of learning, a rallying cry under the term ‘decolonise’. While this moment in educational politics cannot be said to have evolved in the same way on each South African university campus, for us at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) – a campus with a primarily black student body – it was a moment of confronting the intersection of race and class and financial access. The campus was shut down for over 8 weeks in 2016 at the height of teaching delivery time and we, as academic staff, became accustomed (again) to the daily smell of tear gas, to the sound of gun shots, and to the very visible presence of not only the police but also the hired private security company MI7 whose riot shields, AK47 rifles, and stun batons were highly visible when walking around campus. The aggressive presence of armed police and security for hire became yet another reminder that this ‘rainbow’ was, more truthfully, a nation in conflict. At the same time, 2016 was significant for another reason in Shakespeare studies. On the global stage, 2016 marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. How should a South African Drama programme respond to these two key aspects of this moment? As the Speech and Drama Department of the then University of Natal under the initial leadership of Prof Elizabeth Sneddon, Shakespeare and canonical theatre was conceived as “the tool of thought invested by man for the purpose of achieving a civilized way of life”.2 However, in its vital post-94 recurriculation, Drama and Performances Studies at UKZN has severed any major teaching relationship to Shakespeare; he appears now as a small section in a third-level module on “Postmodernism and Performance”, where students encounter a filmic interpretation of a Shakespearean text as a type of theatrical dialectic, and as the practical component of a section on Theatre in Education at level 2. However, in performance, Shakespeare’s work has had more staying power. During the years 2001 to 2010 his plays were staged annually by colleagues Mervyn McMurtry and Tamar Meskin who ran a sponsored Shakespeare Schools festival that attracted over 20 000 school learners from across the province. Performed at the Open Air Theatre, Shakespeare’s plays were made accessible and relevant to enthusiastic young South African audiences. The Shakespearean legacy of this Drama programme also includes Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha. The original poster sits in our graduate seminar room alongside the production’s archival material. Into this confluence of memory, history, politics and the call for educational decolonisation, we decided to set up a two-day colloquium at UKZN (30 September and 1 October 2016) to open up a space to talk, to talk back, to talk anew, and to talk beyond this phenomenon identified as Shakespeare. Our intention was to embrace contestation, and re-imagine what it might mean to “decolonise Shakespeare”. This special issue of Shakespeare in Southern Africa is a collection of some of the colloquium papers. We invite you to engage with this

Parking des Anges [parking angels]: navigating the ‘in-between’ as spaces of transition through the arts in Durban, South Africa

ABSTRACT Durban, on the East coast of South Africa, is home to a growing community of Francophone and other refugees. The most common occupation for these people is the ‘car-guard’ – an informal job of parking and guarding cars for tips. This film and photography documents an interdisciplinary project (2014) conceptualised and facilitated by doung Jahangeer and Miranda Young-Jahangeer through his Durban-based arts organisation dala. The initiative brought together French dance company Ex Nilho (Anne Le Batard, Antoine Bigot); French arts organisation Les Pas Perdu (Guy Andre Lagesse) and five car-guards towards the creation of an artistic language to articulate ‘dis-placed’ experience.

“This Flag Is Mine Too”: Negotiating space for transwomen in Zimbabwe through multimedia approaches

abstract The often violent public discourse around lesbian, gay, transgender, bi-sexual, intersex and others (LGTBI+) Africans can be considered an unmasked and unapologetic strategy by certain powerful African politicians to forge an African Identity through the deliberate acts of exclusion (Hall, 1996) and dehumanisation (Freire, 1970). Former President Robert Mugabe “author of Zimbabwean nationhood” (Muwonwa, 2007:12) through his vitriolic rants such as “We [Africans] are not gay!” at the United Nations Development Summit, 2015, has not only legitimised homophobia but made it a necessary condition for a “true African”. Nonetheless, in 2015 a group of six young LGTBI+ Zimbabweans used participatory theatre as part of a project called Nhanho to engage various sectors of the Zimbabwean public in a bold effort to write themselves back into the definition of African (Sibanda, 2015). One of the members of this group, a transwoman known as “Tatelicious” used this project as a springboard and embarked on an extremely popular social media campaign “the Tatelicious movement” which aimed at shifting transphobic perceptions amongst Zimbabweans. This article explores the possibilities of/for negotiating space for transgender people within the African narrative using multimedia approaches. Further, it will use this case study (project Nhanho and “the Tatelicious movement”) as a way in to critically discuss the possibilities for different popular platforms to subvert and/or reinforce conventional conservative readings of African sexuality and the extent to which the protagonists are complicit in this.