The Ballad of Renoviction
The Ballad of Renoviction: a folk protest play on the rise of privatisation and neo-liberal forces within the Swedish housing system. Performed as part of ‘Stockholm City Blues’- a theatre performance in the form of a city walk hosted by Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus in September 2024.
Organised by Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus and directed by Sebastian Dalhqvist, Stockholm City Blues was a public, situated theatre performance in the form of a city tour. The Ballad of Renoviction was in dialogue with Spelet om Hägersten a worker's play that was written and performed by the Hagersten community in the 1970s and 80s. The performance portrayed the district's history with a particular focus on the fight for reasonable working conditions, safe housing and free movement in the city.
As part of this exchange, PWT devised, produced and performed the ballad of renoviction, which develops themes of class struggle from the original play, looking specifically at the privatization of public housing in Stockholm after the 1980’s when municipal housing companies became more business-like, and sales to private housing companies rocketed. The performance developed Post Workers Theatres use of accessible folk drama to highlight the rise of displacement and housing segregation because of profit-driven privatization and deregulation.
PWT’s Ballad of Renoviction featured as there second scene of the overall City Walk experience, with the play beginning in the Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus and leading the audience down into an amphitheatre park for the performance, and once complete, leading the audience out amongst new housing developments towards the 3rd scene at the Konsfakt University.
The script was developed over a 5 month period through a process of shared practice research discussions between PWT and Sebastian Dahlvqist (Royal Institute of Art Stockholm) and the Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus which enabled a cross-cultural exchange of ideas surrounding workers theatre from both English and Swedish political history, as well as a shared appreciation of the consequences and resistance to neo liberal policy on public housing. Materials from the Swedish Labour Movement’s Archive and Library (Stockholm) informed this process of dialogue and design, building on work started during PWT’s IASPIS residency in 2023.
Photographs by Linus Ericsson & Olivia Löfvander.
