Have City Will Play

HAVE CITY WILL PLAY invites you to a day of playing games in your CITY! "Have City Will Play" in conjunction with CIT:Y Festival and Arts Alive invites you to come and play in the streets of Newtown! On Saturday the 29th of September "Have City Will Play" will begin at 10am at Museum Africa with a discussion series on playing, gaming and performance art within public space given by the organisers- Anthea Moys and Tegan Bristow (see below for more info). After this, attendees will be invited to play one (or both) of two games on offer: "Shoot me if you can" or "The Nonsensical Obstacle Course Race". So! The games will begin at 13:00 and continue throughout the afternoon, but come early as there are limited prizes and limited number of spaces available for each game. As prizes we are giving away full meals at Moyo, theatre tickets for any show at the Market Theatre, tickets to the Arts Alive concert on Saturday night featuring the likes of Giles Peterson, plus lots of fun stuff from the CIT:Y festival. Dress comfortably- no dresses or skirts please as tree climbing and ball dodging is involved! Its free so put on a hat and some sun cream, bring friends and come play! SEE MAP attached for more info WHATS THIS ALL ABOUT? Johannesburg is one of the most dangerous cities in the world, making Johannesburg people 'car people'. When last did you just go for a walk in the city? Have City Will Play is about negotiating this chaos and perceived danger of Jozi through negotiating the city space in an engaging manner through the playing of a game. Have City Will Play is taking advantage of the safe and car free zone in central Newtown created by the Arts Alive Festival to engage in play in this public space. Newtown is seen as a practicing grounds as I hope to extend this project into other areas of town over the years to come. Have City Will Play is part of an ongoing project, which I began as an investigation into the notion of play within various kinds of performance within public space. This project is kindly sponsored by the NAC (National Arts Council) and will be included in a solo exhibition to take place in November this year. FOR ANY QUERIES OR IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE A VOLUNTEER ON THE DAY OF THE GAMES (throw balls at the players, shoot them with water pistols, judge their singing, make sure they don't fall out of trees, etc) , PLEASE CONTACT ME. 084 822 6577 Information on the Discussion Series: Anthea Moys: "After a brief explanation of what it means to play or what play actually is, I will discuss how play is used as a tool through the action of the body- through games and performance in contemporary art today- to negotiate space and express ideas. I will be looking at artists who demonstrate this mode of working as examples. These artists take on roles as directors or instigators of situations, which are governed by play. I will then introduce the game- 'The Nonsensical Obstacle Course Race', not as a type of performance art per say but as a chance for players to take on another role so as to negotiate the space in an alternative way." Tegan Bristow: "I will be looking at a number of case studies that highlight 'play' and communication technologies. I then intend to lead a discussion into the possibilities and limitations of using communication technologies for creative purposes after which I hope to illicit ideas for collaboration and creative projects with communication technologies. To end the lecture/discussion I will introduce the game "Shoot Me if You Can", an interactive cellphone game so ... bring your cell phone and invite players to play." JHB - Arts Alive National Arts Council City Festival 2007 -- Anthea Moys 084 822 6577 anthea.moys@gmail.com

final presentation 15 june. august house

it started at 18:00
with: ATHI PATRA RUGA & ANTHEA MOYS (SA), RAPHAEL URWEIDER & STEFFI WEISMANN (SWITZERLAND) AND KURA SHOMALI & VITSHOIS MWILAMBWE (DRC) in collaboration with JOCA (JOÃO PAULO), MUKUMELA MUSIIWA RATHOGWA, (MANDLA) XTRA MDLULU AND LUVUYO GOPE FROM THE DRILL HALL, BIANCA NOBANDA, KUDZANI CHIURAI, NADINE HUTTON, CHRISTOPHER PATRA, JAMES DYLAN HAPPE and DOROTHEE KREUTZFELDT.

to recap: Effectively KIN-BE-JOZI is an exchange project between artists and cultural networks from BERN, KINSHASA AND JOHANNESBURG. Those who initiated the project and acted as hosts in each city are Eza Possible (collective Kin), Jean Christophe Lanquetin from ScUr&ºK (Paris), Katrien Reist from PROGR_Zentrum für Kultur Produktion in Bern, and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt from the Joubert Park Project (JHB).

The idea: for a group of artists from each city to come together in each city and develop a dialogue in response to the specific context of each city: Kinshasa-Bern-Johannesburg. Each city presents a particular urban reality and ideology; each features differently on a global scale. The idea was to develop a kind of travelling dialogue, that would arise out of the engagement between the artists, the geographic distances and specific moments in the life of each city. As such the project was open-ended, an experiment. It depended on what the artists brought to the group, what they were looking for and how they would take on the idea of a dialogue.

Before JHB: The project started in October last year in Bern, the capital of SWITZERLAND, with a group of five artists from each place. The same group worked together in KINSHASA over December. A regrouping took place in Joburg in May with Raphael Urweider and Visthois Mwilambwe s part of the original group, and new artists including Steffi Weismann, Kura Shomali, Athi Patra Ruga and Anthea Moys. 4 strangers, 3 hosts and their local networks.

The hosts did the introductions to the east end grid - the Drill Hall, PONTY, Hillbrow, GEORGE’S boxing CLUB on Claim Street, 15th floor Plumridge in Berea, KINMALEBO in Yeoville, private strip clubs in Joubert Park, the vacant Ster City, ‘Little Mozambique’, THE Top of Africa’ in Carlton, and further a field Freedom Square, Sandton, Montecasino… From here the city introduced itself - a self-defense book, prostitutes at night below the window, gunshots at the corner, the cold at night, open door parties in Yeoville, Congolese bands, more parties, more dancing, ‘mind your head’, freshFISH from Kerk Street (little 'mozambique'), people running, photographs of AFRICAN leaders in some magazine. Artists were warned not to walk alone in the street, not at night at all… With the focus on process and dialogue, the artists researched and worked in the inner city for 6 weeks, with August House on end Street as their base.

Many of the resulting collaborations and performances were impulsive and site-specific, as much as they followed the interests and modus operandi each artist brought to the group. Raph (dj arafat) collaborated with the drill hall crew (Joca, Xtra, Tashika and Vuyo) on a series of hip -hop tracks; Kura and Raph initiated the 'safari dream team' tour to the wealthy northern suburbs which resulted in an animated photo-series by Nadine Hutton; the sound was edited by James Happe, using interviews that Joca had done during the tour (xtra, your mother is somewhere, we know it). Kura worked mainly in drawings - his visual kura-phone - to try and get closer to the disquietening maze that the city shows. Steffi collaborated with Vuyo on a dada-like xhosa-swiss german song performance (loved those plastic bag beats)...

HOW IS YOUR FRENCH?
Many of the people the artists connected with during the residency are not originally from JHB but come from Venda, Angola, Kinshasa, Harare, and Vereeniging. Between French, English, Xhosa, Zulu and SOUHaeli (spell?), communication was often broken and surreal and left many questions. Dialogues emerged through walking, witnessing, documenting, participating in training, picking up flyers…. It depended on how one would or could read the city’s codes.

for FRIDAY 15 JUNE, the artists and their collaborators presented documentation and selected work/performances. It included slide-projections of the 3 cities, a sort of family album from the 6 weeks in jhb (with patra's 'honey looking butter' shots) and a compilation of video-work produced during the time. The kitchen became the bar (thanks to kudzi for the exquisite shopping trolley with ak47s), complete with african home movie posters ('nigger' is the favourite) and drawings by kura (2010 theme-park). Performances ran parallel: virtual Vicky in dialogue with Steffi, Patra and Ruga - the latter two moved onto End Street to fashion their 'i've got stories' epic conversation between confession, catharsis and pavement pole come-on. The evening acted as a dialogue in progress, in an ongoing encounter with each city. It assumed that cities are expressions of our minds and desires; that they constitute our world-view; it assumed that a great part of cities exists primarily in our imagination, our aspirations and fears; it proposed that as a newcomer you will look first for the hard edges, for incomprehensible realities and the contrasts of a city. Since Kura and Visthois played hard to get in Mozambique (next time please check your visas before leaving SA, we missed you), we turned Kura's room into a 'looking glass' by opening the door, yet obstructing any entry. There were already enough drawings and notes on the walls, amongst the creative chaos and junk. We added a TV that ran off a video camera with one of Visthois' unedited street performance docs in Benin. Rest to say that the evening ended happily on the couches of queen-mother Bié next door; we love august house (thanks Bié ).

Much of the value of a residency lies in the experience itself, in discovering a place with different rules, languages, potentials and cultural givens. Dialogues and exchanges are more often ad hoc, intuitive and incomplete, and only in retrospective do they seem to ‘fall into place’ (or not) in relation to one’s practice. The exhibition acted as a moment, a pointer in this process. ca va deja.

We would like to thank our generous sponsors: the French Institute of South Africa, Pro Helvetia Switzerland and Cape Town, the National Arts Council, the French Embassy in Kinshasa and the City of Bern. Special thanks also to Carole Chauvin (translation and running), Mzebenzi Phakathi (nice follow-spotting), Romeo Puthu and Gilles Akunda, Bié Venter, Joseph Gaylard and Gibson Khumalo.

dorotheek

Saturday Finale- Photos

“Interventions are temporary intrusions in a site that seek to make alternatives evident.” (Spiegl and Teckert:2006:12)

Interventions in this project- whatever shape they took- whether it was riding a bike and dancing and singing to music with a Congolese performance artist and a South African fashion designer performance artist in an old abandoned theatre to riding on the back of a bakkie with 6 others waving DRC, SA and Swiss flags around down William Nicol drive through Four Ways on the Dream Team Safari or boxing with 10 other boxers in a ring on one Saturday night in Hillbrow…


Grab Hold Tightly and Pull Down Hard

Ride your bike
Dance your dance
Tape up your face
Whilst I ride nowhere for no specific reason
But that’s just the beauty of it isn’t it?- for no specific reason
Turn the light on in your ass
Sun shines out
Silhouettes dance in their own way
Interaction challenging and invigorating
Self-defence acting dancing playing gaming repeating

All these actions for me- throughout the whole project-, in some way or another in their simplest terms “seek to make alternatives evident.” Whatever those alternatives may be- highlighting difference (nationality, space, language, race etc). Each artist I feel brought something to the table whereby they acted or intervened within a space and made something evident in their own way through action. Spontaneity is something else, which I truly enjoyed during this project.

Given a chance to interact with a different community, with a different space and to do something in that space and with those people. It is this celebration of the unknown, the possible, the potential, the unpredictable. There’s always more beginnings here than endings… By creating these situations we celebrate potential spaces through actions of ourselves or others (or both).

“Above all, perhaps, it is important to engage in an equal exchange with others that re-embodies experiences and meanings across networks of ‘locals’. In this respect the tricky spirit of invention and intervention seeks to open up new ethical landscapes, creating both new narratives and new agents” (Peluffo:2005:63).

“Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument; and when we wish to move we do not move the body as we move the object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it we have direct access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to the humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception of things.” (Merleau-Ponty:1984:x)

To move my body actively within the space through the action of boxing became my way of negotiating my space in the city. To move with others in this space, to be trained on how to move in the space became a collaborative negotiation of the space which I enjoyed immensely.

"... games are a practice aimed at representing a reality that, in the margin of our daily world, never cease to be taken as a model of reference. Games allow participants to act in a world made up according to their own rules but by which, to a certain extent, re-enact the real world. It's a ritualized activity that places us in a world different from the ordinary, although it is inspired by such a world." (Soler 2004: www.gustavoartigas.com)

Making the boxing act in the ring into a game with my rules turned this quite violent sport into a game. New roles were taken on, new rules were followed, new instructions given and acted upon or ignored: all this created a new dialogue, an extended dialogue. We were not there boxing to win… but just to play by the rules and cohabit the space… and have fun!

Our bodies (the boxers and myself as well as Steffi and George- the instructors) became the tools of the art. We created the situation- set the stage for dialogue. The boxing ring space was seen as a space of potential to me. The work brought up questions around different forms of a limit: grappling with competitive action versus cohabitation- sharing the ring together, sharing a space together.

“Out of the difference between the concrete wish and the unknown, a potential can develop that cannot be imagined yet. This uncertainty, which can be produced, for example, by temporary releasing contradicts the usual logic of planning therefore need other instruments and actors.”