On the 16th of August 2012 34 Lonmin miners lost their lives at Marikana in South Africa. Marikana bears witness to the socio-economic inequality and precarious work and living conditions in South Africa’s new globalized state. Two site-specific contemporary performances Mari and Kana (2015) and lqhiya Emnyama (The black cloth, 2015) voice this sad event in a remarkable way. In this article we critically reflect on the performances’ avenues of creating transformative encounters between performers, spectators and the performance sites in South African society. Both performances invoke for the audience members a remarkable awareness of the performance site as the spectator is obliged to navigate him- or herself in a politically induced public landscape in Cape Town’s Company Garden. We concur that Mari and Kana and Iqhiya Emnyama both elicit a profound reflection on the daily life struggle of mourning women against inhumanity and socioeconomic inequality in a neoliberal South Africa. Unsettling the dominant focus on resilient subjects, the omnipresence of women’s vulnerability in the two performances nurtures a rethinking process on structural justice. In doing so, we more closely analyse the performances’ intention to subvert the constructed category of ‘the mourning South African woman’ via multiple representations of mourning precedents as cultural elements. We conclude that both performances entail unique driving forces that question existing power systems that impact on SA and the problematic structural injustice at the heart of the massacre.
34 Lonmin miners lost their lives at Marikana in South Africa. Marikana bears witness to the socio-economic inequality and precarious work and living conditions in South Africa's new globalized state. Two site-specific contemporary performances Mari and Kana (2015) and Iqhiya Emnyama (The black cloth, 2015) voice this sad event in a remarkable way. In this article we critically reflect on the performances' avenues of creating transformative encounters between performers, spectators and the performance sites in South African society. Both performances invoke for the audience members a remarkable awareness of the performance site as the spectator is obliged to navigate him-or herself in a politically induced public landscape in Cape Town's Company Garden. We concur that Mari and Kana and Iqhiya Emnyama both elicit a profound reflection on the daily life struggle of mourning women against inhumanity and socioeconomic inequality in a neoliberal South Africa. Unsettling the dominant focus on resilient subjects, the omnipresence of women's vulnerability in the two performances nurtures a rethinking process on structural justice. In doing so, we more closely analyse the performances' intention to subvert the constructed category of 'the mourning South African woman' via multiple representations of mourning precedents as cultural elements. We conclude that both performances entail unique driving forces that question existing power systems that impact on SA and the problematic structural injustice at the heart of the massacre. Key words: Marikana, South Africa, Infecting the City, performance, gender inequality, neoliberalism, widowhood IntroductionOn the 16th of August 2012 thirty-four Lonmin miners lost their lives at Marikana in South Africa. They were killed by the police who -after failed, ignored or impeded negotiations between the striking miners -were assigned by the Lonmin Board of Directors and the mining unions to de-mobilize and dismantle the striking mass present at the Marikana area. The Marikana event, as a traumatic culmination of distorted socioeconomic power, demonstrated that South Africa's road to resolving conflict, structural inequality and injustice still remains to be travelled. It demonstrated that organized violence, as it was previously conducted under apartheid, is still operative in the post-apartheid South Africa's globalized state within the context of transnational neoliberalism. This state of affairs has, in turn, led to numerous theatre makers to take up this shocking event, which is now known as the Marikana massacre.The site-specific performances Mari and Kana (2015) and Iqhiya Emnyama (2015), presented at the public arts festival Infecting the City 2015 in Cape Town at a remarkable distance from the Marikana area, take the Marikana killings as their starting point.Every South African autumn Cape Town's buzzing city centre is transformed into an art scene through the annual public arts festival, Infecting the City. This festival, which welcomed over 50 productions and 290 artists in ...
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