Harm and Repair in Contemporary South African Performance

Thirty years after a largely peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa, how is contemporary performance questioning a narrative of harm and repair?The book considers contemporary South African performance and how justice is enacted, digested or rejected on stage. It is an account that moves beyond the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, to explore how women and queer artists stage diverse claims to human dignity, anticipating horizons of freedom, and in so doing, resist the fundamental injustices that persist. Grounded in a queer and feminist methodology forged in Black Study, it offers new understandings of the ways performance and resistance can create openings of refusal.Walsh outlines the ‘national mythos of harm & repair’ – a logic that claims discursive repair of the past, while present-day state violence, gender-based violence and economic oppression keeps the majority of South Africans in dire circumstances. Against this backdrop, the chapters cover a range of examples of contemporary performance of different scales that resist this narrative and which confront ongoing injustices. Starting with the monumental level construction of the Constitution Hill which sets the ground for sites of memorialisation, she moves on to the work of individual women and queer artists (Mary Sibande) and performance forms ranging from mainstream theatre (Empatheatre, Koleka Putuma, Nadia Davids) through to the festival circuit (Mamela Nyamza, Mojisola Adebayo) and activist performance interventions (Qondiswa James; Sibongile Mngoma). The artists’ core tactics are Remembering, Revisiting, Resisting, Refusing, Redressing, Restituting, Revolting.