The Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade: mobilising creative ecologies in the Klein Karoo, South Africa

ABSTRACT

The article explores the multifaceted process of creating the large-scale annual public puppetry event, The Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade, in the rural town of Barrydale, South Africa. It unpacks the complex layers of meaning and making arising through a co-creative puppetry project in a region of South Africa marked by poverty and the on-going everyday legacies of racial injustice and socio-economic disparity. It considers how developing puppetry arts within the Barrydale community has instigated a crucial mobilisation of individuals and the collective, as well as a trans-embodied praxis for generating new ecologies of self and community in the small town.

KEYWORDS:

• Puppetry
• mobility
• South Africa
• Barrydale parade
• performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Aja Marneweck is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects, in the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Marneweck acknowledges the Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape for the fellowship award that facilitated the writing of the present article. All credit for this article is attributed to the CHR at UWC. She is a puppeteer, theatre-maker and academic specialising in Practice as Research in Puppetry Performance. Marneweck is the creative director of the Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade, a landmark large-scale public puppet arts intervention founded by the Handspring Puppet Trust, Net Vir Pret Barrydale and the CHR@UWC.

Notes

1 The term KhoiSan, writes scholar Richard Lee, is a neologism, coined in the twentieth century and used to describe two related South African peoples: the pastoral Khoe or Khoi and the hunting and gathering San who share a series of complex historical, cultural and social links (Lee 2003, 81).