ID

from CHARMAINE DA SILVA ANDERSON and materials from the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement

(IN PROGRESS)

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Disrupted by the COVID-19 Pandemic, ID is an in-development original devised theatre piece created with South African-Irish immigrant and theatre-artist Charmaine da Silva Anderson and Italian designer Roberto Ventruti. In the early 1970’s the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement launched what would become a worldwide boycott of the Polaroid Corporation in protest of Polaroid’s investments in the South African Apartheid system. At the time, the South African government was one of Polaroid’s largest contractors: Polaroid supplied the equipment to develop the identity cards, called passbooks, that would enable the mass segregation, regulation, and exploitation of black and coloured South Africans, sold with the following slogan: “In a complex world, we keep finding complex ways to give the individual his own identity.”

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ID is a piece of documentary-theatre combining Charmaine’s memories of her childhood as a 4-year old coloured girl growing up in apartheid South Africa with verbatim materials from Polaroid advertisements and the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement. Collapsing the personal and political spheres, this devised one-woman performance piece will interpolate Charmaine’s old polaroid photographs with historical records and verbatim texts.

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