Acting Up against Apartheid: Listening to the Market Theatre Archive

ABSTRACT

This article arose out of an exercise designed to consolidate the Market Theatre archive under the auspices of Historical Papers at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). It was called “Acting Up against Apartheid”. In the course of locating and collating documentation related to the Market Theatre in the struggle years, Vanessa Cooke and Carol Preston interviewed 17 of the practitioners who were involved in the Market Theatre at the time. Cooke speculated that because the interviewees were long-term colleagues of hers and they had been through the struggle years in the theatre together, they spoke to her in a kind of insider language and used particular narrative strategies. Drawing on a literature that demonstrates the benefits of listening to interviewees attentively, while pointing out several inadequacies of written transcripts, the authors argue that there is much to learn from the interviews, both about the respondents’ story-telling techniques and their understanding of apartheid.

Keywords:

• acting up
• anti-apartheid
• Barney Simon
• Historical Papers
• Market Theatre