“Come Duze”: Mbali Malinga portrays the sexual violence inflicted on a young girl by a township thug in the play Complexion showing at the Wits Nunnery till this Friday.Photo: Provided
Nothing in Mbali Malinga’s one woman show was over-the-top, despite obvious parallels that could be drawn between this Bildungsroman gone wrong and the infamous television show Yizo Yizo.
The stage of the Wits Nunnery where Complexion played this Monday was completely bare, except for assorted pairs of shoes –stiletto heels, pumps and sneakers – hanging from the low ceiling.
No music. No props. Basic lighting.
But unlike Yizo Yizo, this production swaps gratuity for subtlety to achieve a similarly chilling effect: of the starkness and troubles of growing up poor in South Africa’s townships.
One woman, 15 characters
At the end of play, which lasted a swift half hour, you understood why nothing but Malinga and the raucous rabble of characters she brought with her could fit on to the stage, and only just.
“I played 15 characters. A lot of my personal experiences went into it, as well as a lot of research. I needed to understand how these characters are,” Malinga explained after the show, which she developed and wrote herself, over a seven month period. Complexion evolved from a six minute performance Malinga prepared for her 4th year exams.
[pullquote align=”right”]“This is the story of a girl who is made by the home she comes from.”[/pullquote]
Subtitled “How do black girls paint the sky red?”, the play tells the simple story of a black girl growing up in the township. Malinga plays observer and subject, the latter germinating from infancy to puberty and encountering the almost typical hardships and joys of a black girl in the township.
Almost typical, but not quite. Rather than dwell on those familiar stereotypes of township life, which she portrays with bewitching verisimilitude to the small crowds’ pleasure, Malinga shifts quickly between successive growth phases of womanhood, and consequently from one stereotype to the next, with a succinctness and intensity that denies her audience the luxury of forming simple, emotional reactions to what they are seeing..
More than the wrongs of eKasi
The result is a sharp, darkly collage of provoking vignettes that achieve what Malinga confessed she could not in the six-minute version of the play.
“At first, I was just trying to get that eKasi life out … it was an angry piece that just said this is wrong, this is wrong!”
But after grappling with the physical aspects of the play with movement guru Craig Morris, and taking advice from the unexpectedly “very honest, tough crowd” at the Hillbrow Children’s Theatre, Malinga was able to carve out a simple, powerful story she is proud of.
“This is the story of a girl who is made by the home she comes from.”
Celebration – by Harold Pinter; directed by Clara Vaughan.
The last play Harold Pinter is a scathing comedy depicting three couples dining at a oh-so-elegant restaurant and how each character fights for status and power, their noisy, witty conversation reveals past betrayals and distorted memories, and tries to hide the desperation and emptiness at the heart of it all.
CHILDHOOD TRAUMA: ‘Sthe’ regresses to his unhappy childhood state. Photo: Mia Swart
By Thuletho Zwane and Mia Swart
Torn pieces of paper filled the stage. Crumpled clothing and ties surrounded wine and beer bottles.
Sithembiso Khalishwayo, simply known as ‘Sthe’, appears and screams in anger: “As a child, I thought like a child, I spoke as a child. As a child I spoke of ignorance, ignorance is bliss”.
Sthe crawls under a chair, places his hands over his ears and face, shakes and cries uncontrollably – yelling nursery rhymes in an attempt to shut out the voices in his head: “Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb…Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall…”
Water Glasses covered in Packets of Saltis a physical theatre production, with elements of dance, about gender roles and sexuality. It asks if sex remains a sacred bond between two people, or if it has transformed into something that happens when it’s desired or taken by force, leaving a path of emptiness, guilt and fear.
“The play deals with sex. The idea of being a man, of being a female. What defines the roles of the mother figure and the father figure and how it affects the child?” said Sthe.
He wanted people to experience the same emotions he felt when he performed, he said. The play has a mixed bag of emotions – “emotions we as human beings don’t want to feel but we have to feel them at a certain point in time.”
Sthe said [pullquote align=”right”]The play came from a very personal space. It encapsulated his stories and stories of other people. “I wanted to show a side of me that I haven’t shown in a while, who I am, how I view the world.[/pullquote]
“If you want to see theatre at its core, people should come watch it. It is an emotional rollercoaster.”
Sthe is an actor, teacher, writer, dancer and choreographer who studied at the Wits School of Arts, majoring in physical theatre and performance.
The play is one of a series of plays in the Drama for Life Sex Actually festival, which will run from August 20 to 31 at the Wits Theatre. Water Glasses covered in Packets of Salt will be performed August 23 at 6pm and on August 29 at 1.15pm at the Wits Downstairs Theatre.
MAGICAL ILLUSIONS: Phumzile Sitole, BA theatre graduate from UCT in a timeless surreal space of dreams while performing the play Afrocartography at the Wits Theatre. Photo: Prelene Singh
A STORY of a young girl who seeks her identity by travelling into a realm where imagination, dreams and memory overlap, is being told to Wits audiences to symbolise afro-culture and the migration history of being African in the world.
A stage performance called Afrocartography: Traces of places and all points in between launched at the Wits Theatre on Friday July 19, as part of its 30th birthday celebrations. Produced in conjunction with the Wits Repertory Company, the piece is billed as an explorative and truly African performance piece.[pullquote align=”right”]“Its new, fresh, exciting and poetic and a seminal work for every South African,”[/pullquote]
The main character is Traveller, who takes the audience on a mystical journey of self-discovery. The play takes its audience through a walking route around the Wits Theatre. “It serves as a walking metaphor to capture the essence of travelling, identity, location” as an African person, said co-director Khayelihle Dom Gumede.
Afrocartography carries overriding themes of migration in Africa. The experiences of black people who were faced with dislocation and its emotional consequences are depicted in the stage performance. The play incorporates issues faced by African people through the decades on this continent.
Phumzile Sitole, a graduate from UCT plays the role of Traveller and Tshego Khutsoane, a Wits graduate, plays the map maker who directs The Traveller in her journeys.
The performance is written by Mwenya B Kabwe. She co-directed the play with Gumede, who won the Emerging Theatres Directors’ bursary from the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts. Liya Gonga choreographed the performance.
Kabwe is a well-travelled, Zambian-born writer who has studied at many institutions in the UK and South Africa, including UCT. Gumede said the play was based on Kabwe’s journey in different parts of the world and it was her experiences that led her to “redirect her identity and her journey as a ‘politan’ of various kinds”.
The performance has been described as “Afropolitan” and as an alternative way of being in the world.
The play was first shown in Barcelona in 2009 and again in Cape Town, said Gumede. However, this was the first time it was having a full run. The play took seven weeks to produce, from rehearsal to performance night, said Gumede.
Audiences can expect a mixture of mystery, curiosity, humour and a suitcase of emotion. “Its new, fresh, exciting and poetic and a seminal work for every South African,” said Gumede.
Oh Captain my captain: Director of the Wits Theater Gitanjali Pather Photo: Mfuneko Toyana
Attendance at Wits Theatre’s 969 Festival have been far from overwhelming.
This is despite the fact that plays being staged were hand-picked from the best productions recently on stage at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.
Director of Wits Theatre and curator of the festival, Gitanjali Pather, said she was disappointed that out of student population of 30 000, 5 000 of whom live on campus residences, the audiences have only been about half full.
Lady on a mission
“My chief challenge is to change this… I love this university and I want to make Wits Theatre and festivals like the 969 integral to the life of the university,” said Pather, who surprisingly—for all her enthusiasm and passion for Wits Theatre—is only five months into the job.
But once she began explaining why she thought theatre was so important, her enthusiasm became easy to understand.
“The theatre is an arena of contestations, of opinions, of ideas, of world views, of realities and it requires us to think. No one walks away from theatre unchanged,” she said speaking about the differences between theatre and more popular entertainment mediums like television.
“We are a lazy world. We are constantly bombarded by media and we also want instant gratification. We want to be told what to think and the level of interaction with our world is miniscule.”
Pather explained that since her four years as CEO of the Market Theatre, and right through her “sabbatical” from the politics of being a theatre manager, when worked in advertising while still teaching theatre, she always felt the stage offered a powerful avenue for social activism.
“What people take away from a performance is so unique. The act is such a personal one. It is a relationship established moment by moment between an audience member and the performance. Everyone walks away with something completely different. That is the magic of theatre and the creative arts.”
A history in the arts
Pather’s 27 years in the arts run almost parallel to the 30 year history of Wits Theatre; the coincidences telling and almost poetic.
“When I entered the profession, the arts and the cultural aspirations of the majority of people were never seen on our stages,” said Pather.
However, she also recalled the journey South African theatre has made from protesting minority rule, to offering therapy and hope for the masses.
“It allows people to experience change and catharsis and insight”, she said.
More importantly, she said, the arts offered students a “hemispherically balanced” experience, drawing on left brain and right brain.
“Wits needs to be a cosmopolitan and sophisticated campus. Students need to know that education goes far beyond the perimeters of a degree.”
Witsies, according to her, have everything to gain from attending the 969 Festival.
The festival closes with Skierlik showing on Saturday and Writer’s Block on Sunday.
“I’m not convinced that relationships between students and staff should be off bounds,” said speaker Eusebius McKaiser at a talk yesterday afternoon at the Wits Theatre Complex.
McKaiser was addressing the topic of “student-staff intimacy: a requirement of effective teaching or a danger in a violent society?”
Eusebius Mckaiser tackling a burning issue during his talk on Thursday afternoon. Photo: Pheladi Sethusa
The notion of intimacy
As a point of departure, McKaiser let the audience know that the kind of intimacy he was going to talk about was a “non-sexual intimacy between students and staff.”
He stressed that in South Africa the knee-jerk understanding of intimacy is always associated with an erotic and sexual interpretation and this has come to defile the word.
Personal experiences with “intimate” teacher relations
“It takes one academic to have a profound, lifelong impact on a pupil,” said McKaiser. He went on to give examples of high school teachers who had impacted his life by taking a personal interest in him, one that went beyond a rigid teacher-student relationship.
The teachers that remain memorable to him are the ones who taught with a duty of care and not in an authoritative manner, said McKaiser.
He shared that the Rhodes University philosophy department understood the importance of personal contact with students. Lecturers in this particular department knew their students “beyond their student numbers”, said McKaiser.
The care with which this department handled him led to him dropping law, a department he described as being “cold and impersonal, with no emotional touch point.”
Intimacy is necessary
Intimacy was important in the sense that teachers need to take a deep and profound interest their students backgrounds.
“In South Africa this kind of intimacy which is not sexual but rather a sincere concern for the well-being of students is important. Many students do not speak English as a first language nor have enough social capital to excel in institutions,” McKaiser said.
Can’t avoid South African realities
McKaiser went on to say that while he promotes intimacy between students and staff, one cannot ignore the fact that there is violence on campus. Universities are not special spaces free from South Africa’s social ills.
He went on to say that, “monsters aren’t aliens,” they are the everyday people we interact with, as such even lecturers.”
Code of conduct also necessary
McKaiser said when he began lecturing Philosophy at Wits, he does not recall signing a code of conduct.
He recommended that the university should include mandatory codes of conduct regarding lecturer conduct in their contracts.
“A safety requirement is necessary in a place like South Africa,” he added.
PHYSICAL MOTIVATION: Choreographer Sthembiso Khalishwayo challenges mainstream physical theatre as it has been taught and applied within the School of Art. Photo: Emelia Motsai
Physical theatre – usually considered the preserve of fit, able-bodied actors – will give disabled actors the chance to show Witsies “how they view themselves and interpret other people’s view of them”, during March.
Mammatli Thakhuli-Nzuza, MA Applied Theatre and Drama, said this was the intention behind Am I Really, which she directed to commemorate Disability and Human Rights week.
Am I Really explores the internal voices of a group of Wits students living with different disabilities through the use of movement. The Physical Theatre piece challenges the concept of being “disabled” while highlighting the silent disabilities that exist in all of us.
Thakhuli-Nzuza explained that most disabled students were only reminded of their disability when other people treated them as disabled.
“People tip-toe around disabled people. That’s what makes them uncomfortable.”
Thakhuli-Nzuza will be working with choreographer Sthembiso Khalishwayo, a former Witsie who studied physical theatre and performance. The play will be performed by Sisipho Ntengo, Sally-Ann Bafshoe, Zinhle Nxumalo and Jermain George, all Wits students living with disability.
“Art is everywhere and anyone can do it; the different modes of self expression extend way beyond the physical boundaries we have created” said Thakhuli-Nzuza.
She wants to introduce the Wits University community to physically disabled dancers. She also wants to encourage theatre makers to go beyond the ‘ordinary’ when creating work.
Am I Really will be performed at the Wits Amphitheatre on March 15 and 16, 19 and 20 at 7.30pm. Prices are R20 for students and R30 for non-students.
For more information contact Mammatli Thakhuli-Nzuza on tmammatli@yahoo.com
Performing to a full house at Wits Theatre, kasi-soul pioneers, The Soil, gave a show described by some as “unforgettable”.
Last Friday (July 20), the group took to the stage to present songs from their self-titled debut album and cover versions of songs by legends Miriam Makeba and Simphiwe Dana.
Soulful Sounds: Members of the The Soil (from left to right) Luphindo Nxanga, Buhlebendalo Mda and Ntsika Nxanga performing at Wits University. Photo: Lebogang Mdlankomo
Setting the tone for the night, the opening by versifier Mxolisi Mtshali, who as part of “The Soil family” recited a poem in isiZulu, set a benchmark for upcoming performances for the entire evening.
The audience grooved to sing-along favourites Baninzi, Joy (We are family), Impossible, Inkomo and Bhomba.
Although the group released their deluxe edition in May, the audience still got a chance to listen to songs that were still “under construction”, said group member Buhlebendalo Mda.
Still maintaining their upbeat, melodic and finger snapping traits, songs like Girl you are amazing and another produced with Freshly Ground while being the supporting act during their “Love No Hate tour”, have that “The Soil” trademark sound.
Two part show
The event was not only musically orientated but included a fashion show.
The group’s stylist, Zano Sithetho known as Zano Skorzch, showcased his clothing line. The Kempton Park based designer said his “pretty much vintage” collection comprised of sleek and clean-cut items.
Targeted at 22-34 year olds, the line is for people who want to look good while being fashion forward.
Didintle Tshola, 3rd year BA student, said, “Not only did my soul get fed good music but I got to see beautiful clothing as well”.
“It’s a little early for this but I think I know where my graduation dress is gonna come from,” said Tshola.
Commenting on the experience and outcome of the show, members Phindo Nxanga and Fana Nxanga shared the sentiment that the warmth of the crowd was overwhelming and they enjoyed performing at Wits.
Wits students will experience the sound of kasi-soul, a combination of the Afro-pop, Afro and neo-soul, jazz and hip-hop genres, by trio The Soil later today (July 20) as part of their nationwide campus tour.
The eclectic sounds intended to heal hearts have earned the group a large fan base among young South Africans. Soweto-based group members Luphindo Ngxanga, Ntsika Ngxanga and Buhlebendalo Mda met in high school.
They say God is the first member of the group.
With their voices alone, the group produces sounds of different instruments like the cello and violin while simultaneously beat boxing.
The vintage-styled group won two Ovation Awards at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2010.
They are giving their Wits audience a taste of the finger-snapping music which can traced back to the Sophiatown culture and era.
The sold-out show, organised by Native Rhythms Productions, will be held at the Wits Theatre from 6pm. For video interview and performance clips go to www.witsvuvuzela.com
A selection of Wits’ creative talent was showcased at Late Nite Jam on Monday night. The platform seeks to give up and coming artistes exposure, and attracts those who do not have the resources to organize their own gigs.
Since her announcement as the Democratic Alliance’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, Helen Zille has dominated national headlines. In this bonus episode of We Should Be Writing podcast, hosts Lulah Mapiye and Bonolo Mokonoto dissect a media meet-and-greet with the mayoral hopeful. From her extensive political résumé to her controversial public utterance, we examine why the Democratic Alliance has chosen Hellen Zille as their candidate for the 2027 local mayoral elections. Additionally, […]
