Performing the archive and re-archiving memory: Magnet Theatre's Museum and Reminiscence Theatre

Abstract

In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre's Tears Become Rain and also make reference to several other performances by the same company. My major thrust is to evaluate Magnet Theatre's Clanwilliam Art Project against its set objectives, using Tears Become Rain as a starting point. Tears Become Rain was a single performance of one of the stories of //Kabbo. Every year the creative collective comprising Magnet Theatre, and the University of Cape's Departments of Fine Art and Archaeology chooses a narrative from one of the 2000 notebooks containing 13,000 pages of oral stories transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. These oral narratives are verbatim accounts of the San ex-prisoner, //Kabbo, and a small number of informants who temporarily lived with the writers in Cape Town between 1870 and 1884. This creative collective has been working with close to 700 learners of Clanwilliam aged between five and 18 for eight days each year to produce a performance that gets to be watched by the broader Clanwilliam community including parents, friends and family. One of the objectives of the creative collective is to attempt to reclaim the heritage of the /Xam by reconnecting story and landscape by putting that heritage to work in the Clanwilliam community. It is this performance of the past, its curation and archiving in the present that I want to problematize in this article. I argue that the archive is both a repository filled with random survivals of the past and also a closet that erases or closes out other knowledges. I problematize the notion of preservation of heritage seeing that the San in their nineteenth-century phenotype have completely disappeared in Clanwilliam together with their language and repertoire of embodied acts.