Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my own research practice and theoretical thinking as a theatre maker and urban scholar, this paper considers what theatre and performance as research methods and conceptual lenses might offer to knowing, understanding and working productively with city spaces.

Paper long abstract:

How might we engage everyday life in cities in a way that accounts for it as an embodied, relational practice that is ephemeral through its daily performance but also made durable through its daily repetition? This paper considers my research focus over the last four years which has been to experiment with what theatre and performance might offer to knowing, understanding and working productively with city spaces. As ephemeral, iterative, relational and embodied art forms, theatre and performance suggest themselves as fitting tools for exploring these same qualities in the everyday life of city spaces. Beyond theatre and performance as practical research methods, this paper considers how theatre and performance as concepts afford allusive and fungible lenses for understanding the workings of city spaces so that these spaces might be inclusively and effectively supported through planning, policy making and governance. This paper uses three case studies from my research in inner city Johannesburg: a year-long participatory public art project that was the core of my PhD fieldwork in Bertrams (2015-2016); a 2018 play I devised in collaboration with a company of actors and another theatre designer/director colleague about the role of a heritage building turned art centre in Hillbrow; a collection of short workshops I have run in the last two years with theatre makers and urban planners and designers using the exercises I developed as methods during my PhD to investigate specific urban areas as well as to test and refine the methods themselves.