Two Grahamstown women are part of international collaboration Mamela premiering at Fest this week.
Two Grahamstown women are part of international collaboration Mamela premiering at Fest this week.
Mamela, meaning 'listen' in isiXhosa, is a verbatim theatre piece telling the true stories of eight young women from the Eastern Cape.
Some of the women range from amateurs to professional singers, dancers and actresses.
Others have never been on stage before.
A Rhodes University economics Honours student, Lisa Maholo, and journalist, Caroline King, both call Grahamstown home.
The production has taken over two years of research, interviews, workshops and rehearsals, as well as inter-continental travel to come to fruition.
This project has seen artists from the UK and South Africa embark on an exciting collaboration that fuses traditional African song, dance and storytelling.
It tells of the experiences, opinions and aspirations of the participants, a mixture of moving personal testimonies about their lives, reflections on religion, politics and men, culminating in their ultimately uplifting dreams for both themselves and their country.
The Mamela project was first developed in the Eastern Cape in January 2011, through a series of workshops meeting hundreds of young women aged 16-30 from all over the province.
Mamela is co-produced by UK-based companies Live Theatre and Theatre Auracaria, and is in association with the Swallows Partnership.
The Partnership is run through two foundations, The Swallows Foundation (UK) based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Isiseko Senkonjane (SA) based in Port Elizabeth.
Mamela is on at the Masonic Hall Front at 12pm on 2 July, 2pm on 3 July, 6pm on 4 July, 2pm on 5 July and 10pm on 6 July.
Verbatim theatre: Word for word Verbatim theatre is a form of documentary theatre in which the testimonies of the participants are faithfully recorded, collated and reproduced to tell their real-life stories in a dramatic way.
The recordings are edited to form a play that is rehearsed and performed either by the participants themselves or actors.
The aim is to recreate the first time the words were spoken so that, although now in the context of a bigger narrative structure, they retain the freshness and vitality of the first time they were spoken.
Verbatim theatre also combines the immediacy of real life experience with other forms of theatrical expression (song, movement, dance for instance) to portray the world of the play and the lives of its characters.
