In the most recent issue of Performance Paradigm (number three, February 2007), Rustom Bharucha answered a series of questions on ethics in cultural practice. The material below is reprinted with permission from the editors. Performance Paradigm is an annual e-journal, published by the Faculty of Arts and Social Science of the University of New South Wales and the Performance Space (Australia). (www.performanceparadigm.net)

Questions for Rustom

1. At the ADSA conference you talked about the need for practitioners (and theorists?) to ‘stop fetishizing the metaphysics of impermanence’ and to locate discussion in a ‘more political realm’. You also stated that you felt we needed to ‘seek answers from elsewhere’ rather than from theatre, and you proceeded to talk about your recent work in South Africa with HIV/AIDS sufferers. I’d like to ask you to talk about your choice to work in South Africa and your decision to work with this particular group.

I did not go to South Africa to work specifically on HIV/AIDS. I was invited to participate in a public art project called Tangencya, which has attempted to intervene in public spaces in the city of Durban and its environs, interacting with marginalized communities through different artistic and social practices (installations, architecture, sculpture, gardening, performance, documentary cinema, education). Since one in four persons in the state of KwaZulu Natal is afflicted with the HIV virus, how could one not engage with this reality? The condition of HIV/AIDS is an integral part of public life in South Africa today.

What needs to be kept in mind is that when one is dealing with HIV/AIDS, one cannot separate this condition from other interrelated realities like poverty, xenophobia, racism, and patriarchy. In my practice-based cultural research, I am increasingly interested in investigating the interrelationships of different contexts, or what could be described as ‘intercontextuality’. I am also concerned with the visceral and corporeal reflexes animating the cultures of everyday life. In this regard, HIV/AIDS is a disturbing catalyst because it compels one to probe the stigmas and taboos relating to touch in different states of contamination. In essence, the word tangencya means ‘touch’ in Portuguese. We were interested in exploring the possibilities of touch in a post-apartheid public space. When does touch become a blow or assault? To what extent is untouchability an even more virulent form of violence?

I need hardly add that when one is in direct contact with persons living with the HIV virus—and I would stress ‘living’, not ‘suffering’– that one has to radically rethink the tendency we have in theatre to make a metaphor out of death, or else, to seek a metaphysics out of the eternal death-in-life of theatre practice. We need to trouble our metaphors because they can be falsely reassuring. Death is not a metaphor; it is an imminence faced by millions of persons fighting the HIV virus on a daily basis. Likewise, poverty is a reality, afflicting even larger sections of the world’s population in increasingly dehumanized ways, despite the hype surrounding global flows of capital, technology and services. I find it hard to even think about ‘poor theatre’ today without engaging with poverty in at least some of its economic density and contradictions. Basically, I want to re-insert the ‘real’ within the symbolic and metaphoric domain of theatre practice and disturb its civic protocols.