Hillbrow is a neighbourhood in Johannesburg: a city in a city, a suburb right in the center. Originally planned as a flagship district, Hillbrow, with its decline in the 1990s, became synonymous with violence, poverty and corruption. But thanks to many community initiatives, there are places like the Hillbrow Theater, where children and teens find security and peace. Hillbrowfication is a performance project with kids and young people (ages 5 to 22) from the Hillbrow area: a futuristic approach of life in the neighborhood, where the situation of migrants, violence and xenophobia are harsh realities of their everyday life. An alien invasion establishes a new social order based on people’s dance skills; a revolutionary princess with infinite names is able to bend the corridors of space and time… These and other stories inhabit strange worlds of possible futures and unlikely ones in Hillbrowfication. Between utopias and dystopias of ghettoisation and gentrification, the fictional future histories of Hillbrow, of its cultures and beings, create a universe where the performers negotiate and subvert self-representational narratives and their perceptions of xenophobia and violence in the city.
Duration: 90 min.
A production by CONSTANZA MACRAS | Dorkypark and the Outreach Foundation’s Hillbrow Theatre Project. In coproduction with the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin and with the support of Goethe-Institut. Funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.