Tanzanian popular theatre consists of a dizzying variety of ‘traditional’ dances, plays, acrobatics, and musical acts that freely borrow from traditions across the globe. In a stark contrast to the fluidity of these performances, however, the plays maintain a rigid division between representations of the urban city and rural home. This demarcation operates along the gendered lines described by Anne McClintock, in which the village is coded as the feminized model of tradition in contrast to the ‘male’, modern world of the city, leading to stereotypical roles of the innocent rural girl and the lustful urban woman. At the same time, the participatory, improvisational quality of popular performance clears a space for the ‘unnatural’ urban women in the audience to resist these stereotypes. Also, the theatre troupe Muungano creates plays which challenge essentialist constructions of the primordial ‘home’, allowing complex interactions of geography and gender to be revealed and explored.