In their anthology called The Resilient City (2005), editors Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella suggest that one of the thirteen axioms of urban resilience is 'Site-Specific', furthermore 'all disasters, not only earthquakes, have epicenters' (305). In order to make the leap from the epicenters of natural disasters to ones of socio-political catastrophes (hereto also meaning historical), so as to claim an understanding of site-specificity and resilience I want to provide this recollection.

I am standing in Cape Town's Heritage Square, amongst a pretty pleasant crowd, made up of those who tend to support any kind of 'arty' thing. In the foreground is the renovated St Stephen's Church, converted from the African Theatre in 1839. The African Theatre, built in 1802 was once the first epicenter of European theatre in colonial Cape Town. Brett Bailey, curator of the 2009 'Infecting the City' festival, reminds the crowd of this fact in his welcoming speech, as the original theatre's square is the site of the opening event of Infecting the City. Then he opens a cage to let out a coterie of confused looking homing pigeons - symbolically representing hope/resilience/freedom - who I imagine are to fly over the adversaries of tyranny that emerged throughout South Africa, during last year's infamous xenophobic attacks against African 'foreigners'. The pigeons fly in the direction of the theatre / church and disappear, and as if following their direction, the crowd look over and up, and suspended above us from a crane are the French Acrobatic Troupe, Retouramont performing their commissioned work called Tuning into the Void. Three female bodies dangle in the air ¨- flowing in between an apparent nothingness, in between an abstract consortium of shapes, and geometric arches. It is as if the void might represent the collective amnesia that often follows collective violence. The three artists and their bodies that float in between this amnesia, display a delicate interplay between our intentions to be resilient in the face of crimes against humanity and our futility in really doing so.

This interpretation does come from my sense of frustration with regard to the rise of xenophobia in South Africa and how these particular events eroded the very core of human rights. My interpretation is also flighty and perhaps mimics what emerged as the whimsical nature of the festival itself. It was as if the challenges that were intended to emerge from festival - to defy the socio-political catastrophe of xenophobia became tactics that played out as nice, and pretty - and at times, somewhat naughty, reflecting a sense that it might not be always appropriate to fight fire with fire - or in this case, infect the infection.

The work on this year's festival was inherently political, under the theme of 'Home Affairs'. There was an explicit intention from the festival to express resistance to the xenophobic violence. Resistance was expressed in the various performances at several historical epicenters across the city (neatly mapped and historically explained by festival organisers). There were collaborations incorporating movement, site-specific works, parodies, text and gestures that are worthy of praise for crossing boundaries, placing the allegory of cultural resistance into the present-day frame of reference and remaking new meanings. But my frustration creeps in, for sadly, the infection prior to this cultural one has already occurred; the damage (the selfishness, the hypocrisy, the fear, the violence) exists in Cape Town. I fear we have already infected ourselves. We are the infected.

The works on the festival that managed to reroute the infection from its own aftermath by infecting the infection were the works that met my own criteria: - of being cutting-edge (meaning risky), of performing effectively against terror by expressing terror while simultaneously enacting the recovery of space/place, of demonstrating the ability to perform across the trajectories of time and space without being too didactic about the ironies in doing so, and being not afraid of throwing away altogether the Aristotlean notions of coherent linear narratives. (These issues are also ones which I would consider to be the primary challenges facing the upcoming conceptual installations and various site specific performances occurring through the CAPE 09 Festival.)

It is a pity that not all the works on the festival were so compelling. Don't get me wrong: the premise for the festival is brilliant and refreshing. It needs to be encouraged for taking theatres out of the institutions and putting performance back onto the streets and cities, and thus in the minds and bodies of the people. In the end, I was infected by three works. In Limbo, a collaboration by Brian Geza, Fabrice Guillot, Kai Lossgott and Julia Raynham, I recognised the concept of dismantling the monument by performing an act of recovery.

In Cape Town's Church Square a group of people, who were moving as if dancing, had ropes wrapped around the base of the statue of Jan Hofmeyer (Cape politician and statesmen) and then struggled as if to pull the statue down. This was an act not to dissimilar to the tearing down of statues in Russia and Iraq during their regime changes. The metaphorical dismantling in Church Square did not last long. One by one, the group of performers dissipated from their dismantling, eventually leaving the ropes to their own devices; as if in limbo. Consequences, which were in effect liminal, of both the aftermaths of slavery (once centred on this square) and the more recent xenophobic violence had merged into the same continuum, leaving everything else, performers, objects, sound and audience scattered on the boundaries. I watched the performances again and again over the several days of its performance. Sometimes, I happened to be part of the audience and on other days, I was a passer by who happened to cross the square on my way to work.

My repeated incursion with limbo also softened my attitude to it; as if its daily occurrence succeeded in dismantling my own enclosure; thus, I began to embrace the potential to discover what else out there remains to be discovered. In doing so, I now suspect that site-specific performances in damaged cities, performing at the fault lines, infect the cities' inhabitants to become resilient.

This was also apparent in Exile, a collaboration by Alfred Hinkel, Michael Lister, Mary Manzole and Penelope Youngleson that occurred in one of the fountains along Adderly Street. It was superb. Water is effective when it performs alongside people; in this case 'refugees' waded in fountains as if crossing borders, their burgeoning suitcases hampering their every movement except the desire to be free. A potent image this piece yielded was the wire man balanced on the edge on the fountain, which was set alight. This was a sudden theatrical moment; it immediately if not expediently called to mind what this festival was all about.

Call Culcutta in a Box created by Rimini Protokoll, a reality/trend theatre group from Germany, literally took me to another place. The experience of this work was uplifting, sublime and transcendental. I was moved by this work because it challenged the perceptions of Self and Other, effectively occurring in one hour in a small intimate room. The work was homoerotic, daring, magical and strange. In the hour, I myself as the only audience conversed via telephone and the Internet with Rishi Rajpal, a call centre representative in Kolkata, India. The office where the conversation and our mutual performance took place came alive with gadgets, a kettle, and a magical desk and web cam. It was the moment when I found myself dancing on the desk to some tune from a Bollywood movie, sweetly sung to me by Rishi so many miles away - away from my immediate epicenter, that I forgot about fearing the infection and smiled.

Myer Taub is a research fellow the University of Johannesburg's Research Centre for Visual Identity and Design. He is a PhD candidate in drama at the University of Cape Town.