Space for haunting: site-specific theatre as method for engaging with the complexity of heritage sites

Abstract

This paper considers a devised, site-specific performance in and about the Windybrow, a mining magnate heritage house-turned-arts-centre in Johannesburg’s inner city Hillbrow. The work was called Ngale kweNdlu, which translates from isiXhosa as ‘The Other Side of the House.’ Through scenographic installations and interwoven theatrical narratives, characters and scenes, Ngale kweNdlu sought to draw out the less told, untold and invisibilized elements of the house’s 122-year-old story, putting them in critical dialogue with the documented archival history of the building. From process to final product the notion of haunting became an ever richer way of understanding our engagement with complex heritage through theatre-making in the Ngale kweNdlu process. This paper argues for the ways in which haunting played throughout the work, advocating for theatre as a tool to mobilize hauntings productively in navigating heritage with sensitivity to past social injustices and their legacies in contemporary moments. We do draw significantly on the spectral turn of European critical theory, but our sense of haunting is informed more expansively by the ways in which post-colonial and decolonial discourse argue for an understanding of the spectral that takes seriously cosmologies outside of European paradigms.

Keywords:

• heritage
• haunting
• theatre
• performance
• decoloniality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This broadly inclusive term would, in our view, encompass traditional and ancient African belief systems pertaining to pre-and after-life, and the permeability of connection between ancestral 'shades', earth-bound 'spirits' and living people, as well as multiple variations and denominations of Christianity and other religions. The term would also include animist understandings of land and nature, which go beyond the scope of this particular investigation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.