To stand somewhere: performing complicity

Abstract

This report is the final piece of a performance as research project exploring what it means to be white and English-speaking at the southern tip of Africa. The report is coupled with an autobiographical one man play about myself. The play explores, through a series of monologues, what it means for me to be a white South African. It moves from the specifics of my life to more general assumptions about whiteness and back again. This report runs parallel to the play almost as an extension of it working in dialogue to explore complicity and identity. As an extension of the creative project I have chosen to negate traditional chapters and style for more poetic language intertwined with analytical thinking, which links into the style of the play. The idea behind this is that every world, be it, performance onstage or analytical report writing is merely a part of the continuum called life and by blurring the lines between these it is easier to fuse the learning and the living into a cohesive whole. The creative research shows how the rehearsal and performance process of theatre-making helps to strip away the deceptions that people tell themselves making them complicit in the injustice of post-apartheid white privilege but in doing this it also creates a space where people can feel safe to dialogue about this complicity.