Using theatremaker Mallika Taneja’s guest performance Be Careful, and the global Women Walk at Midnight project as a springboard, this In Conversation between Taneja and Maboneng Community Policing Forum member Duduzile Maseko covers the act of challenging fear, patriarchy, and the limitations imposed on women’s freedom of movement in public spaces.
Moderated by The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s co-founder and director, Bronwyn Lace, the conversation begins with a simple question: Why do you do what you do?
For Taneja, the combination of a family history of migration and loss, a mother tied to a domesticity she didn’t recognise, and being born in New Dehli in a time when great theatre was happening hold the origins of her practice. Maseko cites a history of violence in her childhood home, and the resultant sense of duty and of justice she inherited as the motivation she needs to keep the streets of Maboneng and Jeppestown safe for women.
What follows is a uniquely generative conversation that ranges from discussions around the need to unsettle conventional theatre practices to the artistic, cultural, patriarchal, and post-colonial parallels between South African and India.
The three also discuss the notion of the feigned allyship of the city. “We encounter the city and the system daily as citizens,” says Taneja. “We can understand allyship here as men shifting from the centre, moving aside, but what is the allyship of the city? We are the city. We create that allyship. We layer new images onto the city by occupying it.”
There are also the big, existential questions – how can women be safe? In the city and in the private home? How can young women adopt agency as a strategy against violence, as power and as necessity?
Rather than seeking neat answers or resolutions, these questions are left to hang in the room, inviting in the audience and, by extension, the greater community of Johannesburg, to think alongside them.
— David Mann
CREDITS
DISCUSSANTS | Mallika Taneja & Duduzile Maseko
MODERATOR | Bronwyn Lace