Jay Pather Reimagining Site-Specific Cartographies of Belonging

I was interested in space, and then public space as animate, as a personal and political phenomenon, a powerful conveyor and custodian of power, emotion, and meaning [433].... My singular pleasure in site-specific performance beyond its interplay of architecture, urban spaces and dance is that the moment of interaction is largely uncontrolled and uncontrollable in so many respects [442].... The performed moment is so alive and unyielding on risk, vulnerabilities, truth and openness. This for me encapsulates what living in South Africa requires us to face and build, the coalface of what we as individuals can do in those rich moments of interaction, this opportunity in an emerging democracy to find something new and miraculous in each other, in those private moments in those public spaces, forever shifting, forever tilting [443].

(Pather 2013a, 433, 442, 443)

Jay Pather is a unique South African artist, an award-winning choreographer, curator of site-specific choreographic works, theater director, academic, and cultural activist. I describe Pather as an "ethno-global" artist—a South African first (of Indian, Tamil heritage) with a global vision.¹ He describes himself as Indian in heritage and black in ideology; indeed, he is recognized as a mentor who fosters black artists, some of whose lives he has transformed. He is recognized today as a visionary figure on the South African arts scene playing influential leadership roles in arts organizations and festivals.²

In this essay, I argue that as an innovative choreographer and curator of site-specific works, Pather uses space creatively to inspire social change by providing access and challenging social, cultural, and political exclusions of South Africans of color during and after apartheid (1948–1994). I explore Pather's site-specific work by providing a theoretical context of the conjunctures and disjunctures of space and race in his choreographed site-specific work, Cityscapes, first performed in Durban in 2002, and in Johannesburg in 2003. Parts of the same work were entitled From Before and presented in New York City in 2004. In each city, Cityscapes was received differently since Pather selected different sites for the same performances. Cityscapes demonstrates Pather's imaginative, bold, and unique juxtapositions in the South African context, such as a skateboarder youth encountering a black matriarch or pantsula performers (a popular dance style, described below, of South African blacks in townships) in pin-striped business suits carrying briefcases going up the down escalators in an affluent shopping mall.

I further argue that Pather's aesthetic-political vision deploys art to raise issues of social justice. With his site-specific work he aims to provide access to creative works to South Africans of diverse races, classes, sexualities, physical abilities and languages in domestic, public, legal and governmental spaces, to bring together diverse populations, whether on the street or inside historic buildings, and to ignite unexpected conversations in a society with a devastating history of racial segregation. Even in public spaces Pather's works are as technically accomplished as inside a theater. Pather fulfills these goals by recognizing the human body as a symbol in the struggle for equality. Pather's interventions in specific sites as in Cityscapes (2002, 2003, 2004) that I discuss below (even as I allude to his other creative choreographies) are echoed in Edward Soja's notion of "transdisciplinary perspectives" that includes "social and historical along with the spatial" (Soja 2000, 3).

Pather's aim to provide access to high-quality artistic work to diverse South Africans is a political act in that it challenges the use of spaces recently forbidden to the majority of black and colored South Africans. Controlling space was critical; indeed, it was the foundation on which apartheid functioned, such as the forced relocations of populations of color.³ Henri Lefebvre's text, The Production of Space provides important theoretical engagements with location and space that resonate in my discussion of Pather's transformative uses of sites for his creative work. For instance, Lefebvre describes space as "a social morphology: it is to lived experience what form itself is to the living organism, and just as intimately bound up with...