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Reviewed by:
  • Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa: Cape of Flows ed. by Mark Fleishman, and: Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space ed. by Megan Lewis and Anton Krueger, and: The Magnet Theatre 'Migration' Plays by Jenny Reznek et al.
  • Loren Kruger
PERFORMING MIGRANCY AND MOBILITY IN AFRICA: CAPE OF FLOWS. Edited by Mark Fleishman. Studies in International Performance series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; pp. 236.
MAGNET THEATRE: THREE DECADES OF MAKING SPACE. Edited by Megan Lewis and Anton Krueger. Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd, 2016; pp. 300.
THE MAGNET THEATRE 'MIGRATION' PLAYS. Compiled by Jenny Reznek et al. Cape Town, SA: Junkets, 2012; pp. 184.

Migrants from Africa attempting to land in Europe have captured the attention of global media, but as Loren Landau and others at the African Center for Migration and Society (ACMS) remind us, most migrants in Africa are on the move to destinations within Africa. Since the end of apartheid more than two decades ago, many have sought a better life in South Africa. Although Johannesburg absorbs more migrants than any other South African city, Cape Town has a longer history of documented settlement—by Khoisan herders, by European colonists hailing from the Low Countries, France, and later Britain, and by slaves from India, as well as Indonesia, from 1660 to 1805—and a distinctive creole culture combining Indonesian, Muslim, Christian, European, and even American elements. In the twenty-first century the Western Cape has housed informal migrants from Senegal, Somalia, Congo, and Zimbabwe, as well as formal emigrants from both the affluent northwestern and the troubled southeastern parts of Europe. In addition to this history of migration to the Cape of Good Hope, the peninsula that marks the confluence of flows from Europe and Asia at the tip of Africa, there is the lesser known phenomenon of internal migration by Xhosa and related groups from the impoverished Eastern Cape to wealthy Cape Town [End Page 122] and back. Inspired by these journeys, Magnet Theatre has created vivid and thoughtful performances that animate the stories of people on the move. All three books under review here, despite the general title of the first one, focus on Magnet's work since the 1990s and are most compelling when they draw on the experience of past and present members of the company, supplemented with articles by people who have worked with or closely observed the company and, especially in the Lewis and Krueger collection, with a rich collection of color and black-and-white images.

Magnet Theatre 'Migration' Plays, published by Junkets, a small though vigorous Cape Town press that has built an impressive backlist of new drama, showcases not only four plays, but also Magnet's collective mode of production and distinctive performance method. This method combines company-founder Jenny Reznek's training with the Jacques Le Coq school in thinking, as well as acting, with the body using minimal though carefully chosen props with the research and practice in workshop format developed at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, where cofounder Mark Fleishman worked in the 1980s, while also deploying the stories and skills of more recent Magnet Theatre members. The collection of "migration" plays was compiled by Reznek and Fleishman, collaborating with long-time member Faniswa Yisa and former member Frances Marek, who co-wrote Die Vreemdeling (The Stranger [2010]), and also includes Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking, Magnet's best-known play. Every Year has traveled across Africa and Europe, as well as to Argentina and India. Developed in English and French (with some Xhosa) to speak to its initial audience at a festival in Cameroon in 2006, it is a fine example of Magnet's signature fusion of precise body movement, telling objects, and intellectual clarity. In addition to the central characters—a mother and daughter who flee slaughter in an unnamed central African country and, after several detention centers, land up in Cape Town—Reznek and Yisa played multiple roles as they moved around a metal table that first represented their burnt-up house and later a displacement camp, using props that included shoes that indexed the small feet of a child lost in the fire and the threatening...

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