Performance – Enter the Maids

UCT Drama gradute, performer and theatre maker Asanda Phewa is the latest recipient of the Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary – made possible by a partnership between the Baxter Theatre Centre, GIPCA and Theatre Arts Admin Collective. For the Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary, Phewa has created Enter the Maids, an interwoven adaption of Jean Genet’s play The Maids with her own Under the Pigeon Coop, written under the mentorship of Nadia Davids.

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Start: 22 November 2010

End: 27 November 2010

Venue: Theatre Arts Admin Collective

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Five: 20 Operas Made in South Africa

Five: 20 – Operas Made in South Africa premiers at the Baxter Theatre from the 21 to 27 November. Presented by Cape Town Opera, the University of Cape Town (UCT) Opera School and the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) these five 20-minute long operas have been written by South African composers and writers to celebrate the South African College of Music’s Centenary year.

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Start: 21 November 2010 8pm

End: 27 November 2010 9pm

Venue: Baxter Theatre Centre

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Alan Morris

In ‘The Creature from Planet X: an anatomist looks at science fiction’ Professor Alan Morris of UCT’s Department of Human Biology will explore how science fiction movies like Avatar paint a picture of a possible anatomical reality. Morris, who is both a physical anthropologist and an archaeologist, describes himself as “a self-confessed science fiction special effects junky.

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Start: 28 October 2010 5.30pm

End: 28 October 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Protection of Information Bill panel discussion

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the Protection of Information Bill, GIPCA presents, as part of the Great Texts/Big Questions series, an illustrious panel discussion entitled ‘(Not) a Great Text (but) a Big Question: the Protection of Information Bill’. Veteran writer, philosopher, academic and former Vice Chancellor of UCT, Professor Njabulo Ndebele, will lead the panel which also includes Professor David Benatar from UCT’s Department of Philosophy and Tony Weaver, assistant editor of the Cape Times. The panel will be chaired by UCT academic and prominent theatre innovator and writer, Mwenya Kabwe.

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Start: 21 October 2010 5.30pm

End: 21 October 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Shelley Barry

Filmmaker Shelley Barry will speak about her experiences and experiments in making films from a wheelchair and screen extracts of several short films in different genres reflecting on her process of creativity and production: Extracts will include, among others, a trilogy – Whole-A Trinity of Being, a documentary recounting survival of one of South Africa’s lesser-known wars, namely the ‘taxi wars'; Inclinations – a writer struggles to write erotica and deal with her personal life; Where are my heels? – a tribute to the spirit of a young girl child and Str/oll – a wheelchair user navigates the streets of Manhattan.

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Start: 14 October 2010 5.30pm

End: 14 October 2010 7.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Ian Glenn

Ian Glenn will discuss the influence of eighteenth-century French explorer and ornithologist François le Vaillant on modern South African culture.”Le Vaillant played a major role in establishing how Europe saw the Cape,” says Glenn. “He attempted to represent his South African experience in many ways – from the production of specimens, to lavishly illustrated bird books and travel accounts, and to innovative maps. In so doing, he created more than a single influential text, but rather a range of texts that shaped what came after him, both here and elsewhere. This work helped shape many modern media, genres and intellectual traditions. In many ways Le Vaillant is a founding figure of South African culture.”

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Start: 7 October 2010 5pm

End: 7 October 2010 7pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Peter Merrington

Novelist Peter Merrington’s illustrated lecture ‘First Light, False Dawn’ will explore the making of a public cultural identity for a new nation. ‘First Light, False Dawn’ responds to the first hundred years (1910-2010) of South Africa as a unitary nation-state. The lecture is about the making of a public cultural identity for the new nation circa 1910, a new symbolic order, and the inventing of heritage. Merrington explores the meaning of heritage in the late nineteenth century, in relation to then-popular concepts of vernacular identity in England.

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Start: 23 September 2010 5.30pm

End: 23 September 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Music in the City – Albie van Schalkwyk and the St Petersburg Virtuosen

GIPCA’s next Music in the City concert features the acclaimed Russian ensemble the St Petersburg Virtuosen, which includes the gifted 8-year old violinist Emanuel Meshvinski. They will be accompanied by renowned South African pianist Albie van Schalkwyk. This promises to be a not-to-be-missed evening of chamber music, with works by Ravel, Mozart, Bach, Boccherini, Daken, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and South African composer Hendrik Hofmeyr.

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Start: 22 September 2010 8pm

End: 22 September 2010 10pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performances – Qaphela Caesar

Jay Pather’s Qaphela Caesar, an interdisciplinary contemporary adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, features Mwenya Kabwe, artists from Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, Jazzart Dance Company, UCT School of Dance and UCT Opera School. Pather’s production places Shakespeare’s masterpiece firmly in modern-day South Africa. Based in a world of power struggles and politics, Shakespeare’s classic text about honour, patriotism and friendship has been reworked by Pather to examine corruption and political power from a modern African perspective.

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Start: 18 September 2010

End: 22 September 2010

Venue: Cape Town City Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Foofwa d’Imobilité

Acclaimed Swiss contemporary dance artist Foofwa d’Imobilité will perform Pina Jackson in Mercemoriam as part of GIPCA’s Great Texts / Big Questions lecture series. In ‘Pina Jackson in Mercemoriam’, Foofwa d’Imobilité channels the spirits of three “royals” of dance who within one month passed away: King of Pop, Michael Jackson, Queen of Tanztheater, Pina Bausch, and the Emperor of Dance Merce Cunningham.

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Start: 16 September 2010 5.30pm

End: 16 September 2010 7pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performances – Foofwa d’Imobilité

Acclaimed Swiss contemporary dance artist Foofwa d’Imobilité and his company bring two innovative dance pieces to Southern Africa in September 2010. In ‘The Making of Spectacles’, audiences are invited to collaborate with the artistic team in order to compose a unique performance. The elements presented – dance phrases, dramatic scenarios, music, lighting design, and costuming – are carefully crafted in advance and offered as tools to the spectators for the creation of a dance to their taste.

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Start: 13 September 2010

End: 14 September 2010

Venue: Little Theatre

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Michael Steinberg

Professor Michael Steinberg, renowned American musicologist, will discuss ‘Is Richard Wagner (still) dangerous? Reflections on race, politics and The Ring of the Nibelung.’ Steinberg will reflect on how performers and scholars have confronted Richard Wagner (1813 to 1883) and the Ring’s monumental mixture of music and drama, art and politics, myth and history.

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Start: 2 September 2010 5.30pm

End: 2 September 2010 7pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Coilin Parsons

Irish literature scholar Dr Cóilín Parsons, who will discuss ‘James Joyce’s Shorter Masterpiece: The Dead’. Irish poet and writer James Joyce (1882 – 1941) is considered by many to be one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century. “James Joyce’s writing is not short on masterpieces – Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man, and Finnegan’s Wake inspire awe and fear in those who have read them or read about them,” says Parsons.

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Start: 26 August 2010 5.30pm

End: 26 August 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Music in the City – David Earl and the Odeion Quartet

GIPCA is engaged in an exciting venture entitled Music in the City. It aims to bring music to the heart of the city by reviving one of Cape Town’s most beloved historical concert venues, Hiddingh Hall, on UCT’s Hiddingh Campus. The first concert in the series takes place on Sunday 22 August 2010 when internationally renowned pianist and composer David Earl will be joined by the Odeion Quartet and guest cellist Marian Lewin to perform Earl’s own Piano Quintet in B flat major. The Odeion Quartet and Lewin will also play Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C major.

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Start: 22 August 2010 4.30pm

End: 22 August 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Mark Ellyne

Dr Mark Ellyne has spent over two decades analysing African economies. His lecture will question why Sub-Saharan economies have not performed well, even with considerable IMF and World Bank support. “Some view the IMF as part of an international conspiracy to impose Western economic hegemony on the developing world. Others see it as responsible international cooperation supported by advanced industrial countries to avoid another great depression. Is something wrong with the IMF’s economic advice to Africa or is something wrong with Africa?” he asks.

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Start: 19 August 2010 5.30pm

End: 19 August 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Campus

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performance – Between You & Me

Twenty-three-year-old UCT graduate and Fleur du Cap winner Tara Louise Notcutt is the second candidate to be awarded the GIPCA, Baxter Theatre Centre and Theatre Arts Admin Collective Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary for 2010. Between You & Me explores the relationship between a man and a woman, brought together by the unknown excitement of each others’ worlds. In the spaces between their words, live truth, desire, fantasy and reality; and a dream world in which desire is revealed, even for the briefest of moments.

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Start: 17 August 2010

End: 21 August 2010

Venue: Theatre Arts Admin Collective

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Deborah Posel

One of South Africa’s most prominent sociologists Professor Deborah Posel will discuss ‘Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Waste: Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class’. Conspicuous consumption, or ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ describes the purchase of goods to show status or display wealth. Once more apparent within the nouveau riche or upper-income groups, recent research has indicated how conspicuous consumption is common in emerging economies, where people buy to combat the impression that they are poor. Posel’s lecture looks at the life and writings of the man who coined the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ and the controversies he provoked, as an intellectual and social maverick.

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Start: 12 August 2010 5.30pm

End: 12 August 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Discussion – Present and Future Photography

The panel discussion ‘Present and Future Photography – Capturing the Present, Curating the Future’ will consider the reGeneration2 – Tomorrow’s Photographers Today exhibition. The discussion is a unique opportunity to learn more about this fascinating exhibition from co-curator William Ewing who will discuss how it illuminates current and future trends in photography. The panel includes cultural critic, writer and editor Alexandra Dodd; Dr Litheko Modisane, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCT’s Social Anthropology Department and will be chaired by Professor Pippa Skotnes, Director of UCT’s Centre for Curating the Archive and initiator of the new curatorship programme at UCT.

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Start: 29 July 2010 6pm

End: 29 July 2010 7pm

Venue: Commerce Lecture Theatre

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Exhibition – reGeneration2

The international photographic exhibition, reGeneration2 – Tomorrow’s Photographers Today is hosted by the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA). reGeneration2 shows graduates and students of 48 photography schools focusing on themes as diverse as the urban environment, globalization, issues of identity and memory, their use of hybrid techniques allowing them to obscure as never before the distinction between reality and fiction.

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Start: 27 July 2010

End: 3 September 2010

Venue: Michaelis Galleries

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Public lecture – John Purser

The Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) in collaboration with the South African College of Music presents a musical talk on the leading Scottish modernist composer Erik Chisholm. Dr John Purser – composer, poet, musicologist, author of the award winning Scotland’s Music and the recently published biography of Erik Chisholm – will lead an hour-long musical journey exploring the life and work of Chisholm.

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Start: 20 July 2010 8pm

End: 20 July 2010 9pm

Venue: SA College of Music

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performance – Kitchen

UCT graduate, Amy Jephta, is the first recipient of the recently created Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary, made possible by Theatre Arts Admin Collective (TAAC) in partnership with the Baxter Theatre Centre and Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA). Kitchen explores the ways in which silence manipulates, tortures and drives human beings to the brink and it is structured as a series of three short playlets each with their own title.

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Start: 18 May 2010

End: 22 May 2010

Venue: Theatre Arts Admin Collective

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performance – Il Viaggio à Reims

Il Viaggio à Reims (The Journey to Rheims), a lesser-known opera in the Rossini repertoire dating from 1825, is on at the Baxter Theatre Centre from 9 to 15 May. Cape Town Opera and UCT Opera School’s co-production gives a witty and elegantly choreographic update to this exuberant comedy. GIPCA partnered this interdisciplinary collaboration by funding choreographer Sean Bovim and facilitating the involvement of ballerinas from the UCT School of Dance.

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Start: 9 May 2010

End: 15 May 2010

Venue: Baxter Theatre

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Milton Shain

“Warrant for Genocide: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is Professor Milton Shain’s topic for the next Great Texts public lecture. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been described as the world’s biggest literary forgery and yet, despite intense research into this infamous text, some still believe it is evidence of a Jewish plot for world domination. First published in Russian in 1903 The Protocols has appeared in many versions and has been used as an antisemitic, anti-communist and political propaganda tool in Russia, the USA and Nazi Germany.

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Start: 22 April 2010 5.30pm

End: 22 April 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Rajend Mesthrie

One of South Africa’s leading language experts, Professor Rajend Mesthrie, will discuss ‘Syntactic Structures: Noam Chomsky and the colourless green revolution in language studies’. Avram Noam Chomsky is considered by many to be the father of modern linguistics. Mesthrie’s lecture has Chomsky’s first book Syntactic Structures (published in 1957) as a starting point. “Syntactic Structures started a revolution in language studies,” says Mesthrie, “This involved a Kuhnian shift from the 1940s and 1950s approach of seeing Linguistics as a descriptive science characterizing the languages of the world, to explaining the cognitive (generative) element of language in the human mind.”

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Start: 15 April 2010 5.30pm

End: 15 April 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Lecture and book launch – The Value of Humanities

The Humanities Forum is a collaboration between the Academy of Science in South Africa (ASSAf), Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) and UKZN Press. The public lecture by Professor Ulrike Kistner, The Humanities and Poverty, examines the ways in which the measure of legitimacy granted to the Humanities in South African higher education has been their relation to poverty, and will be followed by a panel discussion with Kistner and Deborah Posel, Mike van Graan, Njabulo Ndebele, chaired by John Maytham.

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Start: 9 April 2010 5pm

End: 9 April 2010 7.25pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – William Kentridge

World famous South African artist William Kentridge will give a lecture titled ‘Putting the ‘S’ into Laughter’, looking at Gogol’s short story The Nose. His recent production of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York earlier this month to rave reviews. Kentridge began working on the opera three years earlier, producing etchings, drawings, small bronzes, tapestries, films and a theatrical monologue in which he performed. In the Great Texts / Big Questions lecture Kentridge will revisit his exploration of Gogol’s story (written in 1836) and Shostakovich’s music (first performed in Leningrad in 1930 before being suppressed and not seen again until 1974).

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Start: 8 April 2010 5pm

End: 8 April 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Imraan Coovadia

Acclaimed novelist Imraan Coovadia will discuss Lolita, one of the most controversial books of the 20th century, for GIPCA’s Great Texts / Big Questions. Written by Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita was first published in Paris in 1955. It is one of the best-known and most controversial books of 20th century literature. Coovadia says: “I’ll be talking about the Lolita problem. How do we respond to a book which is a first person narrative by a man who is trying to seduce a 12 year old girl after marrying her mother? Nabokov promises us readers “bliss”? Well, what sort of bliss? Is there a “lesson” in reading Lolita and why has Nabokov described it as the most moral of his novels?

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Start: 1 April 2010 5.30pm

End: 1 April 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – RoseLee Goldberg

RoseLee Goldberg, world authority on performance art, will be giving GIPCA’s Great Texts / Big Questions lecture on 11 March. Goldberg’s illustrious career – as art historian, critic, curator and author – has spanned almost three decades and has helped shape the public’s view of live performance as a visual art form. Her book Performance Art from Futurism to the Present was first published in 1979 and pioneered the study of performance art; even today it is considered a definitive text on the topic.

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Start: 11 March 2010 5.30pm

End: 11 March 2010 7pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Daniel Herwitz

Philosopher and political commentator Daniel Herwitz will explore “how the media are shifting the terms of democracy in America and elsewhere. The media are now a central, if not intrusive part of the American political landscape and have been since the fatherly fireside chats of President Roosevelt. The media formulate canons for debate, in many ways control the flow of information, and turn presidents into celebrities.

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Start: 4 March 2010 5.30pm

End: 4 March 2010 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Public lecture – Guillermo Gómez-Peña

“Multiple Journeys: the life and work of Gómez-Peña” invokes text and historical photographs to chronicle the performance art practice of post-Mexican writer, artist and activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. By tracing his family life as well as his past 30 years in performance, visual and literary forms, the artist discusses his work in context to the larger evolution of the field as well as to the main political and social events of the times.

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Start: 22 February 2010 2pm

End: 22 February 2010 3pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

International performance – Strange Democracy

In his new solo-performance, Strange Democracy, post-Mexican writer and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña deals with the end of the Bush era and articulates the formidable challenges facing Obama. He also denounces the anti-immigration hysteria and assaults the demonized construction of the US/Mexican border—a literal and symbolic zone lined with Minute Men, rising nativism, three-ply fences, globalization, and transnational identities.

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Start: 21 February 2010 8pm

End: 21 February 2010 9pm

Venue: Little Theatre

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

pre-post-per-form Colloquium

Performance Art and interdisciplinary collaboration have long and checkered histories. Globally, these developments have been anarchic as well as institutional, embracing a paradox inherent in attempts to formalise a process of breaking boundaries of discipline and transgressing the exclusive rules contained in hermetically sealed forms of expression. Sandwiched between public art festival, Infecting the City and Design Indaba, this colloquium on interdisciplinary performance and performance art is a talk/think/do tank of artists, academics, festival directors and curators, journalists and writers.

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Start: 20 February 2010

End: 22 February 2010

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Exhibitions – Third Worlds: Model Cities and Proposal for a New City

In February and March 2010 the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) is hosting two exhibitions that explore Cape Town’s structures. Through a cross-disciplinary range of approaches, the exhibitions focus on the interaction between space, architecture and identity, and raise questions about the future development or decay of the city.

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Start: 18 February 2010

End: 19 March 2010

Venue: Michaelis Galleries

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performance – Ingcwaba lendoda lise cankwe ndlela

ngcwaba lendoda lise cankwe ndlela (The grave of the man is next to the road), a moving and powerful play directed by Donald Gordon Creative Arts Award winner Mandla Mbothwe, will be at Artscape from 10 to 21 February 2010. Told in isiXhosa with English subtitles this production explores economic migration and its impact, using traditional story-telling, rituals, song, physical theatre and multi-media. With the N2 highway as a constant backdrop, stories are woven together in rituals of departure and arrival and the spaces in between.

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Start: 10 February 2010

End: 21 February 2010

Venue: Artscape Theatre

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za