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Soweto and Hillbrow are two of the districts of Johannesburg that the travel guides warn of. This is where the poorest live. This is also where the project oscillating between theatre and reality, X Homes, takes its guests. But, only two at a time. By Susanne Burkhardt

It has two tiny rooms, each about six square metres, and black mould on some of the walls. There is a small lounge and a double bed in one of the rooms. In the other, a narrower bed close to the gas stove. The four stainless steel pots on the metal shelf are arranged neatly in compartments. Busisiwe, 24, lives here with her four-year-old daughter Asoni and her father in the middle of Kliptown, the oldest district of Soweto Township. There is no electricity and water is a few huts down. The young, slim woman shares the toilet, a sort of portaloo, with her neighbours. There are no trees, no paved roads. Some of the houses are built of stone; others are the most meagre tin shacks. Those who live here don’t have much.

One of the routes of the theatre project X Homes leads through this residential area in South-West Townships of Johannesburg, better known as Soweto. Here, at the former hub of the war of liberation against apartheid, where the community spirit is strong, theatre guests will be roaming during the 2010 football world cup in June. They will follow a prescribed route – always two at a time – for three hours to experience a ten-minute play, a performance or just art in the broadest sense at seven different places along the way.

Photo gallery: The unknown Johannesburg

They will not be held in a theatre, but in the homes of those who live here, played or performed by artists from different countries. The viewers will then be amazed to find how very complex this district is. Only one hundred metres from the tin shacks, a four-star hotel stands quite matter-of-factly. It does not need gratings in the windows. The people have respect for one another. The theatre project’s route will also lead to one of the rooms in Hotel Soweto.

The unique format of X Homes was developed eight years ago by Matthias Lilienthal, the director of the Berlin theatre Hebbel am Ufer and has already been exported by the Goethe-Institut to many of the world’s cities, most recently to Sao Paolo, Caracas and Vienna. Each time, the visitors were allowed to experience fictitious scenes in real places, which were sometimes hard to tell apart from “real” life. Here, all the world – and anyone’s home – can truly be the stage.

Contradictions in the former gold mining town

For curator Christoph Gurk and his production manager Anna Mülter, excitingly unknown Johannesburg is a real challenge. The former gold mining town could hardly be more contradictory. Only a few places in the world are home to such rich and such poor people at once. The well-situated neighbourhoods seem like high security tracts where the inhabitants reside in isolation behind walls and electric fences, while the neighbourhoods of the poor in between them make free movement impossible like hazardous shallows in the waters.

Gurk and Mülter chose two particularly difficult neighbourhoods for their theatre project, in which mainly black residents live. Besides Soweto, a tour goes through the district of Hillbrow – Africa’s New York. Every day new immigrants from all over the continent come here. Situated northeast of Johannesburg’s Central Business District, all of the travel guides warn of this district, in which nearly 500,000 people live. It is considered dangerous for tourists; a violent, sinful and corrupt place.

Once upon a time, Hillbrow was a lively and hip hub of nightlife – predominantly inhabited by whites. The dancehalls and cafés, which can still be discovered today, are like spectres of those days. While many other districts were strictly closed to blacks under apartheid, many of them lived here nonetheless, often illegally. Hillbrow became a grey zone where people of different skin colours lived side by side. With the start of democracy in 1994, many whites left the urbane neighbourhood. Today, 99 percent of the inhabitants are black.

Questioning fears

The route of X Homes runs through various parts of Hillbrow in order to show that the neighbourhood, until recently a no-go area, has changed quite a bit and will continue to do so. The South African playwright and theatre director Paul Grootboom, for example, plans to realize his X Homes project in one of the residences here.

Grootboom, who grew up in Soweto, admits to being somewhat fearful of Hillbrow; of its violence and the moral decay. This is a reason for him to come here, deal with his own fears and rediscover the area. That is precisely the aim of X Homes in Johannesburg: the make change visible and rectify outdated images and perceptions. It will question and break down our own rumour-fed knowledge, our own prejudices, fears and projections of violence.

At present, the participating artists, including South Africans Tracey Rose and Nelisiwe Xabe, are looking at the homes picked out for them so they can work on their projects for each of the premises by June. When the first onlookers start out, they will hopefully not only be representatives of the interested white middle class, but also black neighbours who have not been to Hillbrow or Soweto for years and can perhaps rediscover these parts of their city through X Homes.