NEGOTIATING COLOURED IDENTITY THROUGH ENCOUNTERS WITH PERFORMANCE

In this study theatre, as staged performance and as text, will be used as an exploratory and discursive tool to examine the negotiation of Coloured identity in the ‘New South Africa’. I investigate debates on Coloured identity while also drawing on theories of the performativity of identity. The role of performance in negotiating this identity is foregrounded; this provides a context for a case study which evaluates responses by Coloured and Black students at the University of the Western Cape to popular Coloured identity-related performances. These include Marc Lottering’s ‘Crash’ and ‘From the Cape Flats With Love’, and Petersen, Isaacs and Reisenhoffer’s ‘Joe Barber’ and ‘Suip’. These works, both as texts and as performance, will be used to analyse the way stereotypical representations of Coloured identities are played with, subverted or negotiated in performance. I attempt to establish how group stereotypes are constructed within the performance arena, and question whether attitudes can be negotiated through encounters with performance.