Transforming Geographies and Reconfigured Spaces: South Africa's National Arts Festival

South Africa is a nation in the midst of radical sociocultural, demographic, political, economic, infrastructural, and even cartographic transformations. Since the democratic elections of 1994, urban and provincial borders have been redrawn, cities and provinces have been renamed, new communities have sprung up following the removal of apartheid's geographic demarcations, and the boundaries of many of the nation's public and private spaces, once racialized enclaves, are now gratifyingly porous. Of course, national transformations, whether of attitudes, belief systems, or material structures, are seldom total or instantaneous and almost never erase all traces of the old order. South Africa's new geographies are mapped on to the geographies of the past (including the "mental maps" individuals use to orient themselves in the world), and its new structures (again, including structures of thought) are built up within the evacuated or reconfigured spaces of a former era.

South Africa's artistic landscape is also transforming, and the nation's spatial reconfigurations include theatrical space-the imaginative, discursive, and affective space opened up by the performance event. Last year's National Arts Festival, held in Grahamstown, the Eastern Cape, from 29 June through 8 July 2006, offered up a panoramic view of the country's performance practices (620 events over 10 days) and thus represented a unique vantage point from which to consider the place of South African theatre-itself undergoing dramatic change as institutions evolve, artistic priorities and practices shift, and new themes and concerns present themselves-in the nation's transformations.

The National Arts Festival began in 1974 as a celebration of the nation's British heritage and English-language culture and over the last three decades has grown into the largest annual arts festival on the African continent, now professing "to reflect the richness of South Africa's cultural tapestry" (National Arts Festival 2006a). The festival also provides a provisional center for South Africa's geographically decentralized national theatre scene, setting in motion an annual pilgrimage by theatrical practitioners and audiences from around the country. Residents of communities surrounding Grahamstown also come seeking temporary employment or busking opportunities. The influx of visitors transforms the sleepy, rather isolated Eastern Cape town: ordinary flow patterns of human bodies in the town are temporarily redirected as new centers of interest and activity (artistic venues, markets, and eateries) are established for visiting festivalgoers who lack the ingrained mental maps and movement habits of the town's permanent residents-many of whom have rented out their homes for the duration of the festival.

Many of Grahamstown's buildings (churches, school auditoriums and gymnasiums, community halls, and the like) are cleared of their contents, fitted with risers, seating, stage flooring, lighting instruments, blacking, and flats, and co-opted as performance spaces. Remarkable juxtapositions of event and venue often arise: for example, this year's festival saw The Call (2006), an exuberant "township musical" with a live band and actor-dancers costumed in fluorescent hues, taking place in the drab assembly hall of Graeme College, a boys' high school founded in 1873, amid plaques, sporting trophies, and displays of school uniforms from the apartheid era and earlier.

Of course, the new geographies-both on the ground and in the mind-and spatial configurations established for the duration of the festival do not dispel at a stroke all divisions and asymmetries of race, ethnicity, and class. In today's South Africa, a de facto economic segregation has replaced the race-based system of apartheid, and this is no different in Grahamstown and Joza, the neighboring township¹: the inhabitants of the town are mostly middle-class whites; township residents are overwhelmingly black and poor.² Each year, the festival brings a restructuring rather than an abolition of divisions: In general, people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds mix in the town's outdoor, public areas, but racialized spaces can often be found nearby, behind the closed doors of eateries and performance venues.

The most striking change in the festival's theatrical dimension in recent years has been the arrival on the festival fringe of a number of mostly black, community...