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Complicité - Screening Announcement

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 05:36:57 GMT

COMPLICITÉ PRESENTS

CAN I LIVE?

Conceived, written and performed by Fehinti Balogun.

Screening and post- film conversation hosted by Empatheatre @ Bertha House Cinema, Cape Town| 12th October 16:00 - 19:30

Empatheatre with support from the Bertha House, is excited to be hosting a screening and post-film discussion around Complicite’s film Can I Live? at the Bertha House cinema in Cape Town on the 12th of October from 16:00 - 19:30.

The company, alongside Complicite, would like to extend the invite to all Cape Town based activists, artivists and interested parties to attend this free screening and discussion.

Fehinti:

“With ‘Can I Live?’ I want to explain what the climate emergency means to us practically – right now – from the perspective of a young Black man living in London. I want us to feel seen and be heard. To me it is rebellion, resistance, self preservation and activism. I want people to see themselves in my work. For a long time, I didn't hear anyone talk about the climate crisis in a way that made sense to me and my experiences as a Black person, and I

think that is what excludes so many of us from the conversation. Yet, for many people the climate crisis is already a deadly situation.”

Director Daniel Bailey:

“Often we're asked to validate and quantify why making art is important, useful, valuable and relevant. Well this is why, we're trying to shift the collective mindset and the attitude towards the climate crisis from our perspective as Global Majority artists, who want to live in a better world. We wanna dance with you and rock with you until we are all a part of the solution. For a long time this conversation has been colonised and the Global Majority are the ones who continually bear the weight of outcomes and decisions made. Today we ask you to come and be a part of this, come roll with us and let's see how we can make this place feel like home again.”

New Paragraph

The Making of Umkhosi Wenala

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 09:10:46 GMT

The Making of Umkhosi Wenala

Empatheatre and Mbazwana Creative Arts (MCA)in association with Amehlo Productions are proud to present a short documentary film centring on the devising of their acclaimed musical theatrical production Umkhosi Wenala .

This theater-making/storytelling project set out to create an innovative democratic decision-making space for youth in northern KZN, South Africa through the process of restorative public storytelling.

The film is directed and edited by Karen Logan of Amhelo productions with cinematography by Marcello Maffeis and we are thrilled to have this beautiful record of the project which Karen and her team have lovingly created for us.

The film features interviews with Empatheatre Project leader Mpume Mthombeni, Mbazwana Creative Arts director Sphamandla Mzombe and academic Dr Philile Mbatha, whose research in the Zululand area shaped much of the final script of the production.

Addressing Environmental Racism and Spatial Planning

One of the big themes of the film is unpacking Northern Kwa-Zulu Natal’s long and painful history of exclusion and environmental racism, with communities forcibly removed from their ancestral lands for the benefit of mining, tourism, and conservation. The region surrounding the IsiMangaliso National Park, despite being declared a world heritage site, has yet to fully acknowledge and include the cultural heritages of the local Zulu and Tsonga people in its plans and projects. Umkhosi Wenala aimed to challenge this by initiating a public dialogue and alternative approach to spatial planning. By incorporating traditional knowledge, contemporary social dynamics, and cultural phenomena into decision-making processes, the project sought to create a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of the region. At the conclusion of each performance in Mbazwana, audiences were invited to remain behind for a facilitated conversation and discussion with the performers and creative team, this approach could deeply contribute to how we make spatial decisions around the ocean, considering its violent histories associated with the Group Areas Act of 1950 and the conflation of settler colonialism and fortress conservation in the region.

The film has been screened internationally at international policy events, such as the International year of the artisanal fisher at the FAO headquarters in Rome, and goes on to contribute to World Oceans Week 2023, in June, at the UN headquarters in New York City. The film launched online on the 21st April, and intends to contribute to various forms of Ocean literacy work in the future.

Umkhosi Wenala was devised and co-created by the award-winning Empatheatre team of Mpume Mthombeni, Dylan McGarry and Neil Coppen alongside Mbazwana Creative Arts members Sphamandla Mzombe, Dumasani Ngubane, Njabulo Zikhali , Mbali Ntuli, Siphamandla Vusi Mafuleka, Noxolo Thandeka Mlungwana, Zimpendulo Petunia Mthembu, Nokubonga Zikhali, Nolwazi Zulu, Nelisiwe Mbuyazi and Nomthandazo Nxumalo.

The production was made possible through generous support from the Bertha Foundation (Bertha Artivism Award 2022), NAC (National Arts Council) , The One Ocean HUB and ACEP DEEP CONNECTIONS project.

With special thanks to Dr Philile Mbatha for sharing her research and knowledge so generously with us, Adrian Kawaley-Lathan and the incredible team at the Bertha Foundation, Wendy and Neville Aliyff for all their love and support.

Much gratitude and respect for the guidance and wisdom of Elder Jerry Mngomezulu and his activist network. Jen Whittingham for being such an integral friend and advisor on the project. Casey Pratt, Jackie Bruniquel, Karen Logan, Marcello Maffeis and Caroline Burne.

Watch our documentary on The Making of Umkhosi Wenala

Isidlamlilo – this fire burns within us all

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 16:19:40 GMT

Isidlamlilo – this fire burns within us all

Introduction by Kira Erwin

Images by Suzy Bernstein

Isidlamlilo is a profoundly South African story, but one that resonates beyond our borders as people across the world navigate what it means to live in times of conflict. At the dawn of a new democracy, and emerging from the atrocities of Apartheid, violent conflict between the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the African National Congress (ANC) raged in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. From the late 1980s, as the inevitable end to National Party domination was in sight, political and ethnic identities were mobilized to both resist Apartheid, and in a power struggle between the IFP and the ANC. This violence escalated to an average of 101 people killed per month between July 1990 and June 1993 . The reasons as to why politically motivated killings occurred between two organizations who opposed white domination and struggled for freedom for black people are multiple. These range from “socio-economic conditions, to the manner in which apartheid structures created spatial and political boundaries, to direct involvement of apartheid military and police personnel, to decades of 'faction fighting' in impoverished rural areas, to political policy disagreement, to the patterns of class formation, to masculinities, and much more”. As Maré argues these reasons include factions within both parties that refused to readily “accept democratic processes for the resolution of conflict”.

What most South Africans who lived through this time remember is a sense that this conflict threatened to turned KwaZulu-Natal and parts of what is today known as Gauteng into a civil war. A war that came to rest in the most painful of ways on the doorsteps, bodies, and hearts of many Black families. Over two decades into our democracy the stories of this war are seldom publicly retold. Zenzile Masuko, the protagonist of this play, is birthed into this violence. She is a woman who is both victim and oppressor, a care giver, and a life taker. How do we make sense of the violence that marks our past? For Zenzile her answer is simple, we survive.

Watch the Trailor below

Empatheatre | Bertha Artivism Awards 2022

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 08:12:38 GMT

Empatheatre | Bertha Artivism Awards 2022

Umkhosi Wenala - Festival of Abundance full documentary

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 08:01:38 GMT

Umkhosi Wenala - Festival of Abundance full documentary

Isidlamlilo (The Fire Eater)

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 07:05:39 GMT

Empatheatre in association with the NAC and The National Arts Festival presents…

Isidlamlilo (The Fire Eater)

Limited Run in Durban @ The Sneddon Theatre (4 to 9 November 2022)This is a subtitle for your new post

Umkhosi Wenala

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 12:29:04 GMT

Umkhosi Wenala - A new play by Empatheatre & Mbazwana Creative Arts

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Isidlamlilo (The Fire Eater): iPharadise lost*

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 07:45:41 GMT

God! We are a broken country.

After so much violence, so much hope. Truth and reconciliation such a swaying, rickety, patched bridge that well over half of us have fallen through its cracks into the chasm of poverty and its attendant daily and inter-generational traumas.

Written by Steve Kretzmann 2nd July 2022

Source: http://thecritter.co.za/?p=4870&fbclid=IwAR09EbpiEKXLqsn0XgLFgN2SINtFJFn0CN8xTTMJrkWUENH-Vr9tYpx8qHc

Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #19 Collaborative Theatre-Making and/as Participatory Justice

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 07:57:19 GMT

Amphitheatres of empathy

In the earlier part of his career, Coppen’s work tended to travel the mainstream festival circuits around South Africa but he quickly grew frustrated with this way of working, especially in a country like South Africa, where few are able to access theatre or festivals of this nature. His work, he says, has always been research orientated and often takes over five years of investigation before a script is even conceived.

“With my earlier work, the productions would tour South African theatre festivals circuit and perhaps get offered a longer theatre engagement at one or two venues around the country. I eventually grew frustrated over the longevity and reach of these productions, the demographics of festival going audiences, who had access to these stories and why. It felt like there was a ceiling one reached very quickly when working like this. I soon began to explore ways in which to foreground the stories and storytellers who I had collaborated with over the years, artists of immense gifts yet who were too often marginalized from the platforms my own privileges had enabled me to access throughout my career. The hope was that we could collectively forge some sort of new way of listening to, accessing and sharing stories across the country, a way that didn’t rely on traditional theatre models, practices, circuits and institutions.”

There came a point where Coppen felt that a seismic shift was needed in how theatre – centering on advocacy of social justice issues – was researched, devised and performed. He wanted to begin testing how these stories could have a wider reach and impact and how theatre could be utilized as a democratic conversational tool in the process. In the meantime, he was also collaborating with a variety of dynamic young community-led theatre projects in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in South Africa, where younger theatre-makers demonstrated a passion and urgency to address social concerns through storytelling and theatrical processes.

“Working closely with these younger artists and activists, I was able to see how they were grappling with social concerns in their work and I began to explore both the potency and problematics of tackling social- justice issues through the theatrical medium. Some of the early questions I began asking over the years was: Is it not a lost opportunity to not attempt to impart a fresh perspective series of perspectives around a social issue as opposed to simply telling it like it is and enforcing what most people already know? How can theatre and advocacy work in seamless tandem yet without reducing the narrative to one dimensional polemic or soapboxing. Often our knowledge around an ‘issue’ can be relatively superficial and are we not then at risk of perpetuating (even sensationalizing) the same series of stereotypes and myths we have set out to critique?” asks Coppen.

“Too often in Applied theatre processes and characters end up being reduced to mouth -pieces for conveying critical information over fully realized and embodied beings. Most importantly what would it mean if the community-led theatre makers and practitioners were offered the space and resources to prioritize a research process before the theatrical scripting or devising process even begins?”

With these strands playing on his imagination, Coppen teamed up with Mpume Mthombeni, a performer and theatre-maker who uses storytelling as a form of traditional healing, and Dr. Dylan McGary, who has a PhD in Environmental Education with a focus on social sculpture and empathy, to co-found Empatheatre. The term Empatheatre comes from their collaborative work in sculpting new spaces that act as “amphitheatres of empathy”.

The Empatheatre methodology

Coppen describes Empatheatre as a theatre-making methodology that is rooted in research-based practices. One of their first projects was a collaborative IsiZulu theatre piece called Mhlaba noLahle (Soil & Ash).

Coppen was already used to investing in research for all his works. “My processes always take a very long time. If ever I am exploring worlds outside of my own – particularly in a complex, fractured and multifaceted society such as the one I live in – there is a rigour and far more nuanced and deeper collaborative understanding that is needed beyond what I am to offer as an individual.” he says and adds that he has never believed in the master playwright-director hierarchies and that the creative process is always an intensively participative and collaborative one for him.

For Mhlaba noLahle (Soil & Ash), they were approached by a conservation organisation in KZN called Ezemvelo. It was located around a game reserve in Northern Zulu land. The initial brief was to create a piece of theatre around the Fuleni community who lived on the border of a popular wildlife game reserve. The community was faced with a major critical decision of whether to sign away their ancestral land or not, to Ibutho, a mining company which proposed to build a coal mine there.

Ibutho was allegedly bribing and coercing traditional leaders within the Fuleni community to sign away their land, and successfully fracturing community solidarity and trust. There was a lot of confusion, tension and violence beginning to take place within the community. At the same time, Ezemvelo, who approached Coppen and his team in the first place, were putting a lot of pressure on the community to retain their land. The Fuleni community was very divided over what to do. The mine seemed like an appetizing possibility for employment.

“We told Ezemvelo that while we were interested in the project, we were not a theatre-for-development company,” explains Coppen. “We don’t ever move into a space and push a message or single agenda on people. The research and deep listening process by our team, needs to happen from the ground up and not the top down. The genuine needs, concerns of the people in the Fuleni community were the ones that seemed to be the most absent from the conversation and so we attempted to foreground the conversations that were not being had or shared or attended to. These are the voices we work to prioritize these in all our story listening/telling/sharing process.”

The research phase of Mhlaba noLahle (Soil & Ash) consisted of testimonials, oral histories, interviews, exploration of legal documents and images from various communities who had been displaced or affected by land-based mining. Coppen and his team consisting of isiZulu speaking actor- ethnographers to the nearby Somkhele community, who had been coerced into relinquishing their land by similar promises from a mining company.

“The actors visited these places and gathered these stories, and we collectively created a piece that tried to articulate all these different complexities,” says Coppen. “ So much is lost when people’s concerns and frustrations are reduced to a lifeless power point presentation or pamphlet but theatre can make them live in urgent, emotive and hugely innovative ways…ways that connect and unite us all in new forms of dialogue and understanding.”

In addition to taking a complex, multi-voiced look into existing social concerns or problems through their performances, Empatheatre also facilitates post-play dialogues between different stakeholders within the community. Their performances are shown to audiences made up of people with different levels of power, privilege, and agency in relation to the matter being explored on stage. These post-play conversations allow people holding conflicting viewpoints on the central concern of the play, express themselves in a safe and attentive space.

Let’s just listen – Ulwembu

As a method, Empatheatre allows people the opportunity to intervene across a range of spaces, politics, social situations and scenarios. But how does Coppen and his Empatheatre team arrive at which story to tell? He explains that one needs to listen to what are people and participants dominant concerns, anxieties, frustrations are, what is on their minds, where the political acupuncture points are that need the most urgent attention in their respective communities/societies. What are the conversations not being had?

To demonstrate this, Coppen shares how he and his team began working on Ulwembu in 2014, a story revolving around a growing concern on the rapid increase of smoking heroin in communities around Durban in KZN. The drug, locally known as Whoonga, is a concoction of B-grade heroin and other toxic chemical components.

During one of his workshops with young theatre-makers and story tellers in KZN, he facilitated an exercise where each person wrote down five most pressing concerns that they faced in their community and felt they need to be discussed or unpacked further. After each person shares their list of top-five concerns, the group then collectively chooses five that they feel most impact/oppress them.

“In all the workshops I was doing, the number one problem at that time that was surfacing there was Whoonga. How are we going to address this participants asked? How can I help my sibling or parent or relative who has fallen into the spiral of addiction? How could theatre-making and storytelling around these issues actually attempt to address the problem rather than merely articulate how tragic and hopeless it all seemed at the time? That became a much longer and vaster research project than we initially imagined,” shares Coppen.

To take the project further, The Empatheatre founders approached a community-led theatre group The Big Brotherhood and asked, “Does Whoonga interest you and affect you? Is that something you would like to talk about through theatre? This group were impassioned about tackling the subject as it was already having a devastating impact on friends, neighbors and family members.”

The team decided to spend a year and a half doing research trying to understand the Whoonga problem, not just from the perspective of a neighbor but widening the field of inquiry to include the viewpoints of police, policy makers, social-workers, traditional healers, faith based leaders and activists. “We decided to spend one year just listening to the stories, attending to those stories first, before even trying to devise some sort of theatrical output or shaping an advocacy strategy through the production,” he says.

The team would meet every few weeks to sift through all their research, do improvisation exercises to realize where the gaps in knowledge lay. “As this was going on, we were forming partnerships with a homeless shelter in the center of Durban and with academics who are researching the problem. We were trying to understand it from all of the different angles, and then try and articulate that complexity through the creation of an isiZulu theatrical production,” explains Coppen.

This intensive research-based is almost journalistic in nature, investigating every perceivable intersection and understanding how different stakeholders are impacted. To use people’s stories, Coppen and his team ask them for their consent to portray it on stage. Everyone gets an opportunity to see how they’ve been represented and comment back and talk back to it and allow for changes happen.

The tricky bit in all this, Coppen believes, is to find a way to change oppressive behaviour. “My concern with the idea of theatre of the oppressed is that what about the oppressor?” he asks. “If we’re not using theatre to challenge and confront and expose oppressive behaviors then how is transformation or change ever truly going to be possible through storytelling? Unless we try, are we not just preaching to the so-called converted, simply mirroring back people’s realities as they are to them? Because audiences will watch it and say, ‘Yes, I recognize my story. And I perhaps feel honored that it’s been acknowledged and presented like this, but tell me something I don’t know right now’.”

The biggest challenge for Coppen and the Empatheatre team is to move these stories into spaces where people hold power and agency to truly affect change at a systemic level. In that sense, Ulwembu started claiming high levels of access over its five year run. It was invited for a performance at the South African parliament, in front of heads of drug policymakers within the government. It was invited to drug conferences across the country and world, where the play was used as a fascinating and interesting starting point for conversation and deeper discussions around policy and harm reduction campaigns.

Establishing an ethics of care

Detailing his process of deep listening and gathering stories with empathy, Coppen says the essential starting point is to acknowledge the existing levels of power, privilege and agency that are present within the team and using these transparently to the benefit and enrichment of the project as a whole. His biggest lesson in working with Empatheatre projects has been to gather a group of actors who are also intuitive ethnographers and researchers and be responsible for shaping authentic characters from of their research.

“The actors and team members are often involved from the research right through to the developing of their characters, to the strategizing of the story, play plots and what the theatre production ultimately becomes,” he shares.

Coppen also recognises the danger of acting like saviour when one goes out to speak to the affected communities. With Ulwembu, his actors interviewed their family members, neighbours who were drug dealers, friends who were users and runners, as a starting point of research. His job in all this, he says, is to fundraise for resources, forge and facilitate spaces and processes for all the emerging strands of the narrative to coalesce into a theatre production and then manage the logistics alongside his fellow Empatheatre leaders.

But he finds that actors creating the characters by virtue of listening to people they will embody and play in the production, has a profound impact on the authenticity of the characters they go on to portray on stage. It allows them to avoid stereotypes or melodrama by simply imagining or speculating on another’s life story. “Rather, this is a deep form of research where the actors themselves are acquiring that story and honoring that informant with the character they create and put on the stage. It creates a new respect with how you portray that story and how you want to honour the person who’s been prepared to be vulnerable and open themselves up to telling you their story,” shares Coppen.

There are a lot of ethical complexities that come into play in such a process. To establish an ethics of care in the research process, Coppen’s colleague Taryn Pereira, an activist researcher and facilitator wrote down a code of ethics that all collaborators on an Empatheatre project work with:

Do no harm, but don’t be afraid of a little generative tension.
Waste no one’s time.
Be transparent, not invisible.
Contribute what you can (time, resources, networks, skills, access, care).
Listen, observe, and then help to articulate what is happening.
Make space for others to articulate, describe, explain, strategize.
Acknowledge and celebrate the undervalued work of activists.
Expose injustices when you encounter them (after seeking mandate to do so).
Create new opportunities for understanding, growth and change.

Storytelling as a political act requires a politics of complexity. As the conversation comes to a close, Coppen shares stories on how educational and social justice institutions in South African and abroad are now recognising the impact Empatheatre has had as an innovative form of democratic research dissemination, earmarking parts of their budget to initiate similar projects. As storytellers one needs to think deeply about whose stories one wishes to tell, why and how, and recognise who benefits from such a telling.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on the Drama School Mumbai channel:

The Launch of Lalela Ulwandle (Listen To The Sea) New Short Film

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 09:10:40 GMT

Empatheatre will be releasing its first new short film of at a public tribunal that will be lead by The Green Connection as part of their “Who Stole Our Oceans?” campaign.

Empatheatre will be releasing its first new short film of at a public tribunal that will be lead by The Green Connection as part of their “Who Stole Our Oceans?” campaign. This short film is a new iteration of our recent theatre play and radio play “Lalela uLwandle: Listen to the Sea”. Empatheatre was honoured to collaborate with The Green Connection, drawing on our recent research through the One Ocean Hub, on marine governance, and the inclusions and exclusions that sit within the current system.

The short illustrated film, directed, edited and illustrated by Dylan McGarry, is constructed from excerpts from Lalela uLwandle written by Neil Coppen, with contributions from Mpume Mthombeni, Helen Walne, Gcina Mhlope, Taryn Pereira, Kira Erwin and Dylan McGarry. Lalela examines, from the perspectives and worldviews of many South African citizens, the questions, concerns, and thoughts on marine governance, tangible and intangible heritage and rapid expansion of blue economy plans. It also explores the many ways in which people of colour and the poor have been forcibly excluded from their access to the ocean. An example of this exclusion and violence is expressed by Nowandle’s character in the film. She reflects on how her grandmother’s (a traditional healer) pathways to the sea were fenced off by mining and conservation efforts, and the ancient practice of marine-based traditional medicine was stolen from her.

Earlier this year, the Green Connection reached out to Empatheatre to produce something for this tribunal, that could give a small taste of the collaborative research we have been working on with various ocean defenders in collaboration with the Coastal Justice Network. The ocean tribunal which will run over two days (21st-22nd September, with the film airing on the 22nd). This will be an opportunity for small scale fishers and other subsistence and small scale ocean users to present to a jury their concerns as testimonies around oil and gas exploration in our oceans, and what this will mean for their livelihoods, environment, recreation and sacred relationships with the ocean. Actors Mpume Mthombeni and Rory Booth, who narrate the stories of small scale fishers and traditional healers, expressed in the making of Lalela uLwandle, just how invisible and excluded the concerns of people of colour who rely on the ocean for their wellbeing and livelihood are constantly ignored, excluded or their voices edited. Mpume reflects: “It was powerful to learn from Sangomas and Inyangas the ancient wisdom and knowledge of the ocean that these healers have, and surprising that they are not consulted in ocean decision making at all”.

The Green Connection aims to facilitate and encourage public dialogue and testimony around these concerns. Empatheatre similarly works to create an amphitheatre of empathy and works to inspire and encourage democratic public discourse and collective decision making. True to methodology, our small contribution to this Ocean Tribunal hopes to spark a generative conversation around the concerns of the most marginalised and most excluded peoples along our coastline. We hope that hearing the stories told by other South Africans in this format, may encourage further public political storytelling.

It's tragically fitting that this tribunal is happening now, where within the past two months the Kwa-Zulu Natal coastline from Durban to Salt rock is in serious crises. Most of these beaches are currently declared ‘no go’ swimming and fishing zones due to a spate of incidents involving toxic chemicals and raw sewerage.

Over the last few weeks Durban’s Battery beach has been closed after large numbers of swimmers and surfers fell ill with serious stomach cramps and vomiting resulting from a raw sewage spill off Durban’s popular beachfront.

Prior to this incident, all the beaches north of the Umgeni River mouth were closed after contaminated water made its way into the Umhlanga Lagoon after the UPL warehouse, containing extremely hazardous chemicals, was burnt during the civil unrest in July 2021.

After the Warehouse was destroyed, a deadly alchemy of farm pesticides and chemicals ran into the Umhlanga estuary, turning it a luminous turquoise colour, before flowing into the ocean and causing a range of fish and other marine creatures to begin washing up along the coastline.

According to the Daily Maverick, thousands of fish and prawns washed up along the beaches “dead or gasping for breath, while crayfish, crabs and octopus were also reported to have washed up on beaches next to uMdloti.”

The Maverick article goes on to say that shortly after the spill surfers complained of skin burns and that a ban was placed on fishing or eating any marine life off any of these beaches.

At the time of writing, most of these beaches, spanning a significant portion of the KZN coastline, were still no-go zones, with decimated ecosystems, the livelihoods of thousands of east-coast fisherfolk destroyed and a very unpromising future looming for the already devastated tourism sector who depends on the trade of holiday makers flocking to Durban’s beaches during the holiday seasons.

For those of you interested in watching the tribunal on the 21st and 22nd please subscribe to the Green Connection’s YouTube channel where it will be streamed live, follow this link to connect to the program and links to access the tribunal.

Also here is the details for the zoom link for the tribunal

When: Sep 21, 2021 02:00 PM Johannesburg
Topic: Oceans Tribunal Panel Discussion

Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85695874614?pwd=SElVZ1M1b3RZNkZ0blNHemNraDRaUT09
Passcode: 679266

We are grateful to the Green Connection for the funding for this iteration of the short film. Lalela uLwandle was created for the One Ocean Hub with UKRI funding. Lalela uLwandle was created in partnership between Empatheatre, The Environmental Learning Research Centre at the University Currently Known as Rhodes, and The Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology.

Sources.

https://www.iol.co.za/ios/news/kids-get-sick-at-the-beach-e465b67f-baab-4758-9cd3-80689c4fd291

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-07-15-age-of-anarchy-aftermath-fish-and-marine-creatures-in-mass-die-off-after-arson-attacks-on-kzn-chemical-plants/

Amagagasi/Tides - Tracking the tides of history and re-imagining futures in Northern Zululand.

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 07:22:35 GMT

A Mbazwana Creative Arts (MCA) & Empatheatre collaborative storytelling project.

In June of 2021, The Empatheatre team conducted preliminary workshops with thirteen young performers/activists from the The Mbazwana Arts Centre in Northern Zululand. Emerging from these sessions is an exciting new project titled Amagagasi/Tides - Tracking the tides of history and re-imagining futures in Northern Zululand , with research conducted by participants over the next year, culminating in a touring theatre production scheduled for July/August 2020

Amagagasi is a collaborative theatre-making/storytelling project which aims to support a novel democratic decision-making space for rural youth in northern KZN through the process of restorative public storytelling, including voices and perspectives that have been excluded in spatial planning and zonation of world heritage sites that excludes cultural, spiritual and other local perspectives.

The two collaborating organizations (Empatheatre & The Mbazwana Creative Arts headed up by Sphamandla Mzombe & Dumisane Ngubane) share a combined vision for forging inclusive creative processes and spaces where local artists/writers/musicians and performers are positioned centre-stage of their own stories.

The participative research and theatre-making/touring component of the Amagagasi project aims to foster a new public dialogue and alternative approach to spatial planning of rural areas surrounding conservation and mining concessions. One in which traditional knowledge, contemporary social dynamics and cultural phenomena are foregrounded in these decision-making processes.

The Amagagasi project will work with concurrent practices and outcomes, on the one side there is the creation of a powerful piece of street-theatre in which audience members participate in a ‘call and response’ storytelling process that re-maps (in vernacular isiZulu) the land/and coastline, creating an “alternate archive” that re-tells the story of the region from local people’s perspective, and then explores, alongside the public, the potential of devising a new map of the region.

The project received its initial research scoping funding from the One Ocean Hub (OOH) and through the South African National Biodiversity Institute’s (SANBI)’s African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme (NRF-ACEP) funded Deep Connections Project, all of which committed pilot funding for our preliminary start-up workshops. The project forms part of a greater initiative spearheaded by OOH, and SANBI’s NRF-ACEP funded deep connections project to enrich and deepen our understanding of marine ecosystems and the relationship people have with them. The first workshop took place in June of this year whereby The Empatheatre facilitators used chalk drawings on the hall floor to map the KZN coastline and asked participants to locate where they were born and narrate an early childhood memory pertaining to it.

Gradually the cement floor of the arts-centre hall came alive in white chalk lines and illustrations telling a myriad of stories...stories that introduced us to rivers, coastlines, homesteads, lakes, plantations, cattle, horses, hippos, and magical snakes and baboons of the area. Participants then also shared their first memories of the sea, while standing on the map to illustrate where they first encountered it. Over the next few hours the group travelled up and down this mapped coastline listening to participants telling a series of stories and personal recollections around the Sodwana Bay area.

Another exciting generative exercise was the drawing of a chalk time-line across the expanse of the arts centre floor and asking participants to pick up a piece of chalk and fill in the time-line with narratives, anecdotes, stories, myths, events and historic episodes that they personally felt impacted the Mbazwana region and their own lives. This allows for the team and participants to place stories and histories against landmarks and places, but also weave together their memories of the region with each other’s.

Participants were also encouraged to return back to their communities, in-between these sessions, to interview their elders about other stories of the land and sea… stories which were later written (or drawn) into the time-line and narrated back to the rest of the group.

This time line spanned 15m and over the next few days would leap to vivid illustrated life with drawings and isiZulu key words written along it, these were place-holders and land(time) marks for us to return to – walking along the timeline felt like walking as a group across the coastline, and each story felt like the tide rushing up to meet us. All of these tidal shifts revealed layer upon layer of fascinating stories and histories of the region from the beginning of time (mythical and remembered)……. right through to the present day moment. Once again the group moved along this time-line listening to each participant narrate (and even re-enact) their contributions.

After surfacing a range of narratives through these mapping exercises-- combined with a variety of participative theatre and writing-games and exercises which were conducted by Empatheatre facilitators—on the closing day, participants were divided into groups and asked to theatricalize and perform a story which had resonated with them the most over the last few days of storytelling, sharing and listening.

One of the most profound moments in the workshop was witnessing Dr. Philile Mbata from the One Ocean Hub engage with and participate in the timeline process. Dr. Mbata who is based at the Department or Environmental and Geographical studies at UCT, had conducted her PHD over a decade prior in the region and worked with indigenous knowledge holders, many of whom would have been the grandparents of the participants, and had subsequently passed on. As an isiZulu speaker from Umlazi, she has been carrying stories and histories gifted to her, and finally had a chance to share many of them back with the participants. It’s a rare moment when academic work comes back to a community in the language of the place and that can be fully held and used by the next generation who the stories rightfully belong.

At the close of this workshop, a shared project WhatsApp Group was created and participants have been provided with a data allowance from June to November 2021(Courtesy of NRF-ACEP) to continue interviewing and sharing stories centring around the research questions/collective interests which were decided upon over the course of the first meeting.

Over the last two months the WhatsApp group has already generated a wealth of incredible interviews with local fisherfolk, sangomas and elders from Mbazwana and continues to surface powerful narratives, mythologies and belief-systems pertaining to the region. All dialogue, sharing of stories, and collaborative analyses of the stories are occurring in vernacular isiZulu, Empatheatre feels strongly that every stage of the research and devising of a new project should occur in the main language of the region, and we have been very inspired by the rich idiomatic and poetic framing and shaping of stories that is emerging in northern Zululand dialects.

We are currently fund raising and preparing for a series of follow up workshops that will work to transform these insights and oral histories into a thrilling hour-long theatrical production which will tour the Mbazwana/ Sodwana bay region for a week in July next year.

Empatheatre part of a cross continental collaboration

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 09:54:27 GMT

Empatheatre were thrilled to have been a part of this cross continental collaboration, project and publication which launched on Monday the 9th August in both South Africa and the UK.

Early in 2021, four participants from Oudtshoorn, a town in the Klein Karoo area of South Africa’s Western Cape, and four from Moston and Salford Greater Manchester in the United Kingdom, embarked on a virtual four-part online journey to listen, share, and learn from each other’s stories in a series of stimulating online workshops and conversations.

This project was made possible by the British Council’s Developing Inclusive and Creative Economies Programme (DICE). SICK! Festival, the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Young Identity and Empatheatre. The online sessions were presented in April and May. The digital experiences and workshops were facilitated by SA’s Tshego Khutsoane and the UK’s Shirley and Nicole May, using processes and methods inspired by their own collaborative theatre and performance backgrounds.

The common thread and theme that has been emerging across the two continents in the discussions is ‘Inherited Resilience’.

The poems in the resulting (maga)zine map that journey, celebrate their individual and shared experience, chart their generosity and creativity, and archive a sacred connection.

The talented participants were: Glenisha Tarentaal(SA), Joan Turner (UK), Olive Oragui (UK), P.A. Bitez (UK), Shandré Harris (SA), Siyasanga Building (SA), Tiffany Saterdaght (SA), Faidat Ope (UK) and Medulla (UK)

Lebogang Mashile, well-known South African poet and Kadijah Ibrahim, celebrated British poet were guest speakers and inspired the group even further during one of the digital sessions.

The (maga)zine and video will be available on www.kknk.co.za from the 9th of August. Experience the powerful poems and stories by tuning in on National Women’s Day (SA) and National Book Lovers Day (UK) for powerful messages of resilience.

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This world oceans day, Empatheatre is delighted to be celebrating...

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 07:18:09 GMT

This world oceans day, Empatheatre is delighted to be celebrating our new Animation Project which aims to educate South Africans and the world around the cultural and spiritual significance of the oceans from the South African Context. We are putting on the finishing touches of the animation entitled "Indlela Yokuphila". Which is isiZulu for “the soul’s journey”.

In this transdisciplinary and trans-epistemological project, artists, traditional healers, marine sociologists and deep sea marine ecologists have come together to collaborate on a more holistic biocultural alternative to ocean mapping and decision making. In the isiZulu traditional ancestral belief, the deep sea is the resting place of our ancestors, and after death the soul travels from the land, through streams, rivers, estuaries and eventually into the sea. In our main narrator character uGogo's words from the script:

"When you die, the rain compresses your body into crystals and squeezes out your soul, until you are born into the dreaming world, where you swim in the isihlanjana, the small streams - you become a young ancestor, bantu nohlanjana. As a young ancestor - idlozi elisalincane – you hear the song of the river of life –and you remember the personality of that place. Down-stream you swim, following the song of your great-great-grandmothers, who call you from the deep sea, ulwandle olujulile. You flow down the umlambo/ river (umfula) and grow older, remembering. You become Bantu Nomfula, a person of the river.... You swim deeper and deeper, following the songs of oGogo abadala. When you get to the source of the song, you find very old dark women who live there. When you first arrive, they are waiting to receive you – with the deepest love. They will know exactly whose child you belong to."

This journey was explained during an oral history that Empatheatre co-director and founder Mpume Mthombeni held with a traditional Zulu historian for the One Ocean Hub research project on transformative ocean governance in South Africa. The animation offers an expansive contribution to dialogue around mapping the ocean that includes and prioritizes cultural heritage narratives, as well as enabling new dialogue to emerge around how scientific and indigenous knowledge systems and their inter-related concerns can shift the ways in which ocean decision making is undertaken. Indela is being collaboratively developed with talented and visionary animator/director Marc Moynihan and Empatheatre co-director Dylan McGarry. Composer Braam Du Toit has created an original score for the production, which feels like a mini opera.

Mpume Mthombeni narrates this story, which carefully honours the original telling and has been involved in guiding every step of the production, as well as the original historian and traditional healer involved in the early telling. Dylan McGarry adapted the story for screen, into a short script, and careful 'call and response' research has been undertaken around the ethics of representation with the original knowledge holders, and other Nguni spiritual practitioners, to ensure the animation is honouring the mystical knowledge of the marine world as the realm of the ancestors.

We will be launching the final film closer to the end of this year 2021. However we will be doing early screenings of the second animatic with research partners and other knowledge holders to ensure the animation is able to meaningfully represent and honour this extraordinary story gifted to us.

Empatheatre is excited to be co-facilitating an exciting Online project

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 20:01:10 GMT

Empatheatre is excited to be co-facilitating an exciting Online project, a partnership with the British Council - a first for the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK)

Empatheatre is excited to be co-facilitating an exciting Online project, a partnership with the British Council - a first for the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK) – and aims to create a unique opportunity for young women from the South African town Oudtshoorn to connect meaningfully with like-minded rising stars and leaders in the United Kingdom (UK).

For this project, the KKNK has joined forces with Empatheatre as part of the British Council’s Developing Inclusive and Creative Economies programme (DICE), in collaboration with the SICK! Festival and Young Identity in Manchester, UK.

After an extensive interviewing process by our Empatheatre facilitators, four local participants were identified to attend a series of ongoing facilitated Zoom workshops interacting closely with the UK participants.

The online sessions commenced in April and will end in May – and have been taking place each Thursday. The digital experiences and workshops are facilitated by UK’s Young Identity team Shirley and Nicole May and South Africa’s inimitable Tshego Khutsoane, using processes and methods inspired by their own collaborative theatre, poetry and performance backgrounds.

“This project is a springboard for long-term cultural collaborations between the project partners, with the voices of young female leaders at its centre,” says Hugo Theart, Artistic Director of the KKNK. It will be a dream come true if the four successful candidates’ participation in this programme could result in further involvement with other activities and future projects of the arts festival.”

To learn more about the incredible work done by our UK co- facilitators and partners please visit www.youngidentity.org and www.sickfestival.com

Empatheatre STAND Online Summer School

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 19:32:58 GMT

Empatheatre STAND Online Summer School

The Empatheatre Team were delighted to be invited by the Sustaining Theatre and Dance (STAND) Foundation to create and teach a four-part course on their methodology as part of their Online summer school programme which ran from the 9th the 18th March 2021.

The STAND summer school programme was created to offer participants the opportunity to upskill themselves and acquire insights into how to strategize and think innovatively around the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The foundation, under the expertise of Mike Van Graan, commissioned and curated a dynamic series of online courses throughout March, which ranged from creative theatre skills, to business and entrepreneurial skills, contractual and intellectual property knowledge. Bursaries were made available to cover both data participation costs as well as fees for those who required assistance.

For more information on this wonderful organization please visit www.standfoundation.org.za

Our Empatheatre Zoom course was attended by over thirty practitioners and participants ranging from students, actors, learners, drama-teachers and lecturers, academics, puppeteers and activists from across South African and as far afield as Dublin, Ireland.

The facilitators Neil Coppen, Dylan McGarry and Mpume Mthombeni guided participants’ through an interactive series of workshops and discussions around their research-based, theatre-making methodology, covering aspects of the Empatheatre theatre-making process including action-based research, identifying matters of concern, finding the central image and how to craft and shape research data into an engrossing true-to-life theatrical experience.

Over the duration of the four, two-hour sessions, participants were encouraged to develop their own theatrical idea or concept and receive feedback from facilitators and the rest of the group. The Empatheatre team were greatly encouraged by the interest and responses generated by the course and will be announcing new dates shortly for a second online iteration.

Reflecting on the course, Dublin based practitioner and theatre-maker Aideen Wylde commented:

“For me it was just an amazing opportunity, not only to experience the work that you do, but also to encounter a community of artists and makers working in a cultural context that is different to mine. I found the company's generosity in sharing every detail of the making process refreshing and inspiring, and the shared facilitation of the material from the different making perspectives was engaging and enriching. The parts that resonated with me were those around the economy of symbolism; tapping into what is essential; the unpredictability of the post-show discussions and how that might work in an Irish context; also what are the topical issues here that would benefit from applying methodologies such as Empatheatre?”

Another exciting outcome of this project is that the Empatheatre team will be initiating a monthly 'community of practice' Zoom meeting platform whereby practitioners from around the world can meet and reflect further on each other’s work and processes. If you would like to join these sessions and be included in the mailing list please drop us a line in the contact section of our website.

STAND Foundation Summer School Course with Neil Coppen, Dylan McGarry and Mpume Mthombeni.

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 07:12:35 GMT

STAND Foundation Summer School Course with Neil Coppen, Dylan McGarry and Mpume Mthombeni.

Empatheatre: A four-part interactive course on the Emaptheatre theatre-making methodology

Facilitator: Neil Coppen, Dylan McGarry, Mpume Mthombeni.

Course description: Empatheatre is a research-based, theatre-making methodology and award-winning Theatre company which emerged ten years ago from friendship and solidarity between artists, academic researchers, activists and responsive citizens.

The Empatheatre process begins with extensive action-based research in which co-participants and key partners work to identify matters of concern and a pressing central question. Through these research explorations the team works iteratively to shape the research data into an engrossing, relevant and true-to-life theatrical experience. The theatre production offers new ways of seeing different perspectives on a complex situation, and above all honours the participants’ narratives.

The script is first performed to participants and partners to check the credibility of the play. Performances are then rolled out to strategic audiences. Audiences are made up of people with different levels of agency, power and privilege in relation to the matter of concern. Audience members are invited who hold diverse, even conflicting, views on the central concern represented in the play.

Post-play facilitated dialogues with the audience allow for another layer of reflexive data to emerge in relation to the issue of concern. In this way Empatheatre is a method of conducting and publicly interrogating research that democratises the way in which we surface and co-create knowledge.

Over four sessions, Empatheatre co-founders Neil Coppen. Dylan McGarry and Mpume Mthombeni will talk through case studies of their companies previous productions as examples, guiding participants through the process of developing their own mini Empatheatre monologues and pitches.

This course is aimed at anyone interested in using theatre to address social justice concerns as well as exploring the possibilities of theatricalizing and making accessible aspects of academic research.

Length of course: 4 sessions of 2 hours each

Venue: Online, Zoom

Number of participants: 15

Dates: 9, 11, 16, 18 March

Times: 16:00 to 18:00

Fee: R250

Bursaries to cover fees and data to facilitate participation are available

To apply, click here

The South African play that’s tackling the scourge of the street drug whoonga

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 05:50:16 GMT

Read our recent publication in "The Conversation"

This article was first published in THE CONVERSATION on the 21 Feb 2021

The drug whoonga has plagued South African communities for at least a decade, yet only gained significant public attention when it appeared more visibly in the inner-city and surrounding suburbs of Durban, the major city in the country’s KwaZulu-Natal province.

Also known as nyaope, whoonga is a street concoction of B-grade heroin, rat-poison (strychnine) and various other chemical components. It’s most commonly sprinkled into a hand-rolled cigarette and is easily accessible and sold more cheaply than other street drugs. Withdrawal, known as “arosta”, is reported to cause severe stomach pain, that only eases by smoking again, trapping users in a vicious cycle.Often used by young people, the drug has had a complex and devastating impact on communities. Yet government, city officials and non-governmental organisations have struggled to combine forces and react with the urgency and meaning to the crisis. At times their responses even appear at odds with one other.

In 2014 we began working in Durban’s KwaMashu, Umlazi and inner city areas. As a team of academics and storytellers, we wanted to see if theatre could unlock more humane and collaborative responses to whoonga. Some of the users we met were as young as eight years old and living on the street with a severe heroin addiction.Over two years we collaboratively developed a play called Ulwembu (‘spider web’ in isiZulu). We have since performed it to diverse affected communities and for policymakers, impacting lives, and the production is now set to travel internationally.

Listening to the community

The Big Brotherhood, a KwaMashu-based theatre company had noticed the absence of fathers and good male role models in their community and in response created public storytelling processes, told by men. Our research would confirm that almost every whoonga user we met had an absent father.

In 2015 the group began collaborating with award-winning South African playwright Neil Coppen, Durban actress and ethnographer Mpume Mthombeni and myself, an educational sociologist (with mentorship from academics at Durban’s Urban Futures Centre).The goal was to diversify the pathways available to users to either manage the risk associated with whoonga use or manage their way out of addiction. In the research process we could see that the pathologising of whoonga users was a significant problem. We began to look at what was absent: meaningful care and empathy for users. Instead of stigmatising and criminalising them, we wished to address addiction as a mental health issue. It was also clear that there was a need to establish more dynamic and empathetic forms of partnership between government and civil society groups.

So we gathered oral histories of diverse citizens – whoonga users, police, parents, health care workers, community safety groups, social workers, faith leaders, academics and others. We transformed these into an immersive theatrical production which ended up doubling as a policy brief.

About the play

The play tells the story of six people caught in the whoonga web. They include Bongani, a drug dealer; Portia, a police lieutenant on the front line of the fight against the scourge; her son Sipho; his friend Andile; and Emmanuel, a Mozambique-born shopkeeper.

An audience watches a pained middle-aged woman hold a bowl towards the mouth of a man handcuffed to a bed.

Portia (Mpume Mthombeni) tries to get her son Sipho (Zenzo Msomi) to eat as he withdraws from whoonga. Val Adamson/Ulwembu

The play traces Sipho’s descent from talented scholar and aspirant musician to drug user. It also tells the story of an ambitious policewoman and mother whose son gets caught in the whoonga trap. Portia’s inner conflict mirrors what we witnessed in our research across the city. Ulwembu explores the effects of addiction not only on those who suffer from it but on communities, families and the police. It provides insight into the positions of those trying to control the trade, those who benefit from it, and those harmed by it – and how they’re all part of a complex social web.

To create Ulwembu we developed an interdisciplinary theatre methodology which we have named Empatheatre. Our hope was to create public storytelling encounters that form amphitheatres of empathy within which we could share real-life stories with the intention to inspire and develop a greater kindness in spaces of conflict or injustice. In the published script, Ulwembu specifically shares the many stories of young whoonga users in Durban and explores the role police and government services play in the lives of vulnerable youth in the city.

Complex characters

The police were clearly a group we wanted to work with. An empathetic approach challenged existing policing responses and policy directives. Street level drug addiction has, in South Africa, tended to focus on crackdowns, dispersal and heavy-handed enforcement. Inspired by Paulo Frere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed we realised we needed to also consider the pedagogy – or teaching – of the oppressors.

And so Portia, a policewoman who desperately seeks balance between justice, mercy and empathy, centres the narrative. The character is based on testimonials gathered from police officers as well as parents of drug users, allowing us to examine two strands of research through the lens of a single character.

The ‘oppressor’ dynamic of the police was detailed to us through interviews with users, social workers and health care workers. Even some police officers felt that arrest quotas and crackdowns cause more harm than good and longed for an alternative. Portia was our way of showing how, when it comes to addiction, the oppressor – the police – can in a relative instant be transformed into the oppressed – a mother trying to save her son from addiction. No one is immune.

Ulwembu speaks to the realities of why people begin to use drugs in the first place. It does not aim to ‘scare’ young people into avoiding drugs. The life of a whoonga user is scary enough. Instead it tells everyone’s part of the drug story fairly, without judgement. This was central to how we dealt with stereotyping and the dangerous myth machine that influences our perceptions of street level users.

The future

Since launching Ulwembu our team has become involved in ongoing forums with various players in the city, law makers and government ministers. During our run at the Hillbrow Theatre in Johannesburg in 2017, we performed to members of parliament and organisations directly involved in drug policy. Afterwards, the director of the Hawks (the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation) expressed how powerful the evening had been. Towards the end of 2018, the production was performed at the Drug Policy Week conference in Cape Town, with key local and international policy-makers in its audience.

Ulwembu has been invited to participate in the Drug Policy Alliance Reform conference in the near future (pandemic depending)— and so its international journey begins.We began this process with the goal of responding to the complexities surrounding street level drug addiction in Durban, yet found ourselves exploring and tending to a myriad of sociological, political, economic, cultural, psychological and spiritual realities, that in turn, changed us and the production. The script of Ulwembu also contains the production’s research and outcomes and is available from Wits University Press.

Storytelling as a political act

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 19:43:43 GMT

Our incredible Empatheatre Collaborator Dr. Kira Erwin has just published an article in the Critical African Studies Journal on her work leading the Last Country Empatheatre project. It explores some fundemental insights and questions emerging from our work in Empatheatre, and explores the poltical rigour we undertake in this work, as she says in her abstract: "Making accessible research findings through forms of storytelling is a useful method for activist and public scholarship. This article explores these possibilities through a project on migration and gender in the city of Durban, in South Africa. The research project collected oral histories of migrant women’s experiences in the city, and, in collaboration with artists, wove these narratives into a theatre performance titled The Last Country. The Last Country used an antiessentialist politics to complicate, disrupt and make messy exclusionary hegemonic narratives on migration and gender that circulated within the contemporary social fabric. Storytelling as a political act is made visible through a reflection on the storytelling processes in the project. Building a chorus of voices, not just in the stories performed but in the design, data collection and analysis stage of a research project, is a productive and critical method for developing storytelling as an intentional political act. Public storytelling, such as The Last Country, used counter-hegemonic narratives to disrupt, disarticulate and expand dominant storylines, so that we may reimagine anew alternative ways of seeing and being in the city." to read the whole article click here

Empatheatre as a Pedagogical Tool

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 12:05:13 GMT

End of year Empatheatre newsletter.

Earlier in the year, as Covid-19 began to spread its barbed and all-encompassing tentacles across the globe, our Empatheatre team quickly realised that we would have to rethink and reimagine our busy touring schedule. On reviewing the challenges the pandemic would pose to sharing our stories with audiences in communal public-spaces, our team decided to refocus our energies instead on adapting our production of Lalela uLwandle into a radio-play/ Podcast.

The three narratives and characters featured in Lalela uLwandle lent themselves beautifully to an audio reimagining, as did the evocative sound-design by Tristan Horton and score by Gary Thomas and Guy Buttery. If you haven’t yet listened to the Podcast of the play, please do so by clicking on the below link….

https://soundcloud.com/user-670708972/lalela_ulwandle

Obviously we've been heartsore to not be able to join together in our Empatheare circles this year. We’ve missed the interaction with our audiences, the intimate and tender acts of sharing and listening as well as the stimulating post-show discussions and debates which usually occur after every performance.

Still, the succession of obstacles 2020 has lobbed at us, have also allowed for some exciting new innovations and developments to take place within our praxis, some of which have ushered us into unexpected new creative and pedagogical arenas.

Working with the Podcast format is one, we still believe, enables our audiences to engage in deep empathetic listening. One might ever consider the reception of these stories-- via earphones-- a deeper and even more involved listening experience. In this format, the listener is not spoon-fed visual clues as they are in a live performance. but rather encouraged to dream the stories to life in the auditoriums of their own beautiful and boundless imaginations.

Another exciting development that has occurred by working within aural arena’s such as the ones we are currently experimenting with, is that our Empatheatre stories and productions are now able to travel more easily and broadly enabling them to be used as resources readily and freely available online to teachers’ and lectures’ across the globe.

New Paragraph

Spotlight on Big Brotherhood Productions

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 09:55:51 GMT

Kwa-Mashu Based theatre company The Big Brotherhood were integral to devising and performing in the Empatheatre production Ulwembu.

At the time of writing this profile on the company, The Big Brotherhood consisted of members: Ngcebo Cele, Vumani Khumalo, Zenzo Msomi, Phumlani Ngubane and Sandile Nxumalo. One of the first projects which the Big Brothers collaborated on was titled Crime Busters (2005), a theatre production which focused on the consequences of committing crime.

The earliest incarnation of Crime Busters, was described by the actors as more of a workshopped sketch than a fully developed play. Owing to the fact that some of the actors had spent time in prison, they were able to draw from a range of personal experiences and reflect on their own lived experiences in the play. The project was later redeveloped under the new name of Just Don’t, Wrong Choice (2006), with the assistance of director Edmund Mhlongo and relied on the team improvising and refining scenarios during the rehearsal process. In this phase, a more traditional three-act structure was introduced, and the story now followed the journey of a teenage school boy sentenced to jail for stealing a cell phone. The production would experience a further iteration as part of the Playhouse Community Camp under the guidance of theatre-maker Chris Hurst who assisted the group in reshuffling scenes and clarifying some of the story-telling aspects.

Just Don’t went on to tour schools across KZN and to this day, is considered the collectives most popular and widely seen pieces. After the success of Just Don’t, the members of the group approached the Netherlands funded Twist Theatre Production Projects to help them establish and register their organization, and thus Big Brotherhood Productions was born. The first play the Brothers created under this moniker, was a Twist Theatre Development commission titled Camp 13, which focused on the disillusionment of the ANC’s forgotten Umkhonto we Sizwe veterans.

The group claim that the piece grew from a mutual interest they had around the older men of their community, who they would encounter in KwaMashu, B-section, drinking alcohol and complaining bitterly about the state of the nation. The intention behind the Brother’s research was to ascertain why these former revolutionary soldiers had felt so betrayed by the present day government. Their research process entailed interviewing a range of MK veterans before delivering transcripts to an appointed mentor/playwright David Stein, who would set about transforming the transcribed and translated data into a rehearsal script. Owing to the fact that Camp 13 was openly critical of the ANC government, the Big Brotherhood performers recall that a variety of industry players cautioned them of the impact such politicized work may have on future funding opportunities from Government affiliated arts organizations. Ngcebo Cele claims that while the group were concerned about political repercussions, they remained resolute in their mission to tell the mens’ stories. While the subject matter may have been deemed controversial and risky, Camp 13 resonated deeply with KwaMashu audiences, many of whom felt that their frustrations had been legitimized and honoured on a public platform.

Following on from Camp 13, The Big Brotherhood created (with support by TWIST and in collaboration with Neil Coppen as a writing mentor and Edmund Mhlongo as director) a production titled A Bull Called Bahlangane. The production was the groups way of trying to make sense of the many political conflicts occurring within their community and the country at large. For A Bull Called Bahlangane, the Brothers and Coppen, contrived an allegorical fable where a respected elderly man in his community passes away and his five adult sons descend on his homestead for the funeral. The father's prized bull named Bahlangane divides the brothers, causing rifts and factions as they argue who is the most deserving benefactor. The brother characters were used as devices to embody conflicting political ideologies. Through the families in-fighting, the brotherhood is gradually torn apart, and ironically it is the youngest son, whose opinions are seldom considered by his elders, who is revealed to harness the greatest insight and wisdom of them all.

In 2014 The Big Brotherhood collaborated with Mpume Mthombeni, Neil Coppen and Dylan McGarry on the making and touring of the award-winning production around street- level drug addiction in Durban titled Ulwembu.

Presenting Empatheatre to the United Nations by Taryn Pereira

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 09:43:33 GMT

UN World Oceans Day Presentations

World Oceans Day, commemorated every year on the 8th of June, is recognised and promoted by the United Nations as a day for ‘celebrating the role of the oceans in our everyday life and inspiring action to protect the ocean and sustainably use marine resources’ (https://unworldoceansday.org/).

The Lalela Ulwandle team was beyond excited when we learned in February that we would be spending World Oceans Day 2020 in Lisbon, Portugal, at the UN Oceans Conference, performing our play to audiences of international policy makers and civil society, bringing the voices of marginalized KZN coastal communities to the global ocean governance stage! But, alas, as we and the rest of the world would shortly discover, 2020 had other things in store for us…

When the immensity of Covid-19, and its scrambling of all plans, started to sink in, we had to think quickly and creatively about how we might continue to share Lalela Ulwandle with strategic audiences this year.

When we took Lalela Ulwandle on tour in KwaZulu Natal in late 2019 and the Eastern Cape in early 2020, we performed for over 1000 people, including newtorks of small scale fishers, mining affected communities, school learners and other members of the public from small towns along the coast. The perspectives and voices in the play had resonated strongly for these audiences, and generated important dialogues about ocean heritage, persistent racism within environmental conservation, injustices of access to marine resources, spiritual connection to the sea, and more. However, we had not yet shared Lalela Ulwandle with audiences of decision makers, marine spatial planners, environmental impact assessment practitioners, and others who hold influence in terms of the implementation of the Blue Economy. Our plan, in 2020, was to perform at a number of strategic events – the UN World Ocean Week, the IUCN World Conservation Congress, the South African Marine Science conference and the SA Marine Spatial Planning working group – in order to get a dialogue going between the ‘unheard voices’ of coastal people who were represented in the play, and those who make decisions that affect coastal people and the ocean.

When we realized that we would not be able to travel with Lalela Ulwandle this year, we started to think about how to share the play virtually, with these strategic audiences and others. Almost immediately, the team shifted gears and began working on a range of platforms for sharing our work in other ways – including through a radio version of the play, a video trailer of the play, a short documentary about Empatheatre, a beautiful new website, and an animation that explores an aspect of our research with traditional healers.

The One Ocean Hub took the initiative of negotiating and establishing a platform for its researchers to present their work virtually to audiences that we might have met at the UN Oceans Conference, via the UN World Oceans Day One Ocean Hub portal, a week long series of webinars on a range of cutting edge ocean research (https://bit.ly/UN_OOH ).

Our team presented two webinars at this event: Lalela uLwandle (Listen to the Sea) – Emotional connections and participatory ocean policy, and Indlela yokuphila (The path of life) – Innovative connections between traditional knowledge, ocean science and ocean decision-making. These were well attended and well received by international audiences, and have led to some exciting new opportunities and potential partnerships. The experience of developing these webinars has helped us to imagine further ways that we might share the immersive Lalela Ulwandle experience and generative post play discussions with a range of people, in these times of Covid-19; using headphones and zoom, in place of our (preferred) circle of scuffed chairs in a theatre or community hall.

You can watch the recordings of our webinars here:

https://bit.ly/OOHyoutube.

Listen to our Lalela uLwandle Audio Play by Dylan McGarry

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 08:55:39 GMT

Making our stories accessible in a post COVID19 world

The experience of COVID19 has been disruptive for us as it has been for almost every human being on the planet. We were scheduled to take our show Lalela uLwandle (Listen to the Sea) on a tour to other parts of South Africa, as well as internationally. We were so looking forward to sharing this production in Lisbon, Portugal where we had been invited to stage the show at the World Oceans Conference. As this was no longer possible, we discussed how we might continue to share our work, and to create public listening spaces to surface silent and untold stories from our recent research into Ocean Livelihoods, heritage and governance in South Africa.

With this in mind (factoring in the limitations of social distancing and lockdown restrictions) our team came together online, under the guidance of director and lead script writer Neil Coppen, and re-invented the theatrical production as an immersive audio play with an all-encompassing sound design by resident sound-magician Tristan Horton. The audio version also debuts an orginal score developed by Gary Thomas and Guy Buttery. This audio version of Lalela uLwandle will be shared across radio stations and podcast channels both locally and internationally (with interactive post-show talk-back panels with the Empatheatre team) as well as be made available to teachers to use as a learning resource in schools.

We warmly invite you to make a cup of tea, plug in some head-phones , close your mouths and open your ears and spend the next hour in the thrall of storytellers Mpume Mtombeni (Nowandle), Alison Cassels (Faye) and Rory Booth (Niren). In many ways we feel this iteration speaks even more carefully to the delicate and important stories we have become custodians of.

Enjoy.

A theatre project explores collective solutions to saving the ocean by Dr Kira Erwin

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 20:55:15 GMT

The earth’s oceans are under grave threat. Scientists in many fields have pointed to the large-scale negative shifts brought about by human-made pollutants, mining and overfishing.

Faye (Allison Cassels) recounts the wonder of baby cuttlefish. Image by Casey Pratt

Nolwandle (Mpume Mthombeni) performs the symbolic destruction of homes. Image by Kelly Daniels

Niren (Rory Booth) sends a prayer into the ocean for his grandfather. Image by Val Adamson

Making sense of drug use: The power of Ulwembu by Prof. Monique Marks

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 20:55:01 GMT

MAKING SENSE OF DRUG USE: THE POWER OF ULWEMBU
By Monique Marks By Monique Marks

The following text was published as a foreword in the Ulwembu play text by Wits University Press.

New Paragraph

I have never been directly involved in the creative arts. I have, throughout my life, lacked the confidence to view myself as a creative person, although I have come to realise that every person has the capacity to be creative. Not all of us, however, have the skills, talent and knowledge to be able to pull together a powerful production that rivets audiences and assists in making sense of very complex problems.

My personal inadequacies in regard to the creative arts were, in some ways, reinforced, as I became part of, then watched in absolute awe, the production of Ulwembu by the Big Brotherhood community theatre group. This highly skilled group of actors, directed by Neil Coppen and Dylan McGarry, brought to a number of stages (formal and informal) in both KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, a theatre production that will not be forgotten by any person who watched it.

Ulwembu, which focuses on the various spider webs tangled in the world of street-level drug use, is, without doubt, a powerful and deeply researched presentation on the pathways into and out of problematic drug use. The play is situated in Durban, where smoking brown heroin mixed with a number of other (often toxic) compounds has become alarmingly widespread. Whoonga – the street name given to this heroin-based compound – is ubiquitous in Durban and in other parts of the country.

Immediately after using Whoonga there is a sense of sedation and hypnotic calm, the withdrawal symptoms related to stopping (or attempting to stop) using are nothing short of horrendous. Nightmares, tremors, sweats, intense head and stomach pain, as well as heightened anxiety, all accompany withdrawal and act as a strong deterrent from abstaining or even reducing use. This horror is brilliantly portrayed in the play, providing the viewer and the reader with critical information about why ‘just stopping’ is an option that is unlikely to work.

But Ulwembu teaches us far more about street-level drug use. Arising out of Big Brotherhood’s intensive research, in dialogue with academic scholars, is an intricate map of the many possible factors that give rise to problematic drug use, to being involved in dealing in drugs, to the impact of drug use on families and communities and to the various options that (ideally) exist to reduce the harm associated with drug use. As a theatrical production Ulwembu provides a platform for exploring the vexing emotions and circles of blame that surround the use of drugs, particularly at street level.

The production is underpinned by two important sensibilities. The first is ‘the more we see drugs, the more we see people’. This means that in the production people for whom drugs have a primary salience are not dispensable non-humans. On the contrary, as the play so brilliantly demonstrates, they are people who have experienced some form of disconnect or trauma in their lives and the drugs are a solution that blunts these feelings. They are thinking, feeling beings who should be awarded the same basic human rights as any other person, including the right to privacy, health care and dignity.

The second sensibility is that coming down hard on people who use drugs – particularly those from low-income backgrounds – does more harm than good. Users become increasingly stigmatised, traumatised and marginalised when a heavy-handed law enforcement approach is used, usually as the first line of action.

Criminal records make finding ‘decent’ work incredibly difficult and so, as the play brilliantly shows, users become dealers. And dealers, contrary to popular belief, are often not just the ‘bad guys’. In some cases they are the only people who are able to hear and make sense of the daily struggles of those who have a drug-use disorder. But beyond this, they are, equally, trying to forge a meaningful life for themselves that generates an income, which often benefits extended family members.

What is needed instead is compassion and an understanding of what pathways are or should be available to those with a drug-use disorder who are keen to normalise their lives and recover from the harmful impact of dependent drug use. We need to take collective responsibility for making sense of problematic drug use and finding solutions that are based on positive personal experiences and on international evidence of best practice harm reduction.

The dialogues and monologues that make Ulwembu facilitate deliberation among and between a wide range of social groupings, including people who use drugs, family members, religious leaders, police, government officials, policy-makers and civil society. The dialogue between the actors and the audience, together with the visual representations of real-life characters caught up in the web of drug use, provide insights that generate empathetic responses rather than moralistic and judgemental ones.

The research that constituted the foundation of Ulwembu, as well as its performance, and the engagement that resulted from this, directly influenced the establishment of South Africa’s first Opioid Substitution Therapy (OST) Demonstration Project, which is located in Durban. The OST Project staff attended the play, which reinforced the empathetic approach that has been built into the project from its inception.

In each of the 50 beneficiaries of the OST Project is a voice that resonates with the characters in the play. The voice given in Ulwembu to people who use drugs has played a very important role in advocating for harm-reduction interventions in South Africa, including OST.

As a scholar and a public intellectual I found working closely with Ulwembu’s producers, directors and actors a truly remarkable experience. Despite having researched drug use in the field I was unable to unearth the nuances and deep emotive underpinnings of all those entangled in the world of whoonga use.

The Big Brotherhood actors had a remarkable capacity to reach into the lives of the characters they represent in the production – the users, the police, the dealers, community members and social workers. It was not surprising, therefore, that acting out the stories they had revealed took a massive emotional toll. In turn, the emotions that were so evident on the stage, and the empathetic way in which each character was depicted, left an indelible mark on my own psyche and on my understanding of how best to research both the everyday and the extraordinary.

Equally important, at a personal level I have come to realise that I can play a role in the creative world and that it is imperative to collaborate with creative artists in making sense of and bringing to the fore narratives and solutions that resonate deeply with our humanity and our need to fix ‘wicked’ problems.

Monique Marks

Professor and Head of the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology January 2018

Hands Off/ Hands On by Quanita Adams

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 20:52:56 GMT

Quanita Adams writes in her personal capacity on what social justice and Empatheatre theatre work means to her.

Three weeks spent travelling the city with Boxes has left an indelible impression on me. Cutting a swathe across class, language, culture, as well as the geography of the city presented us with many opportunities to share our little play-thing, and also listen, hear, and most importantly – learn.

Every day, for sometimes three times a day, we would pack up our world into six boxes, shove those into a car, pile in, and head to our venue – a school hall, a recreational hall, an open space in an occupied hospital, long since defunct. With every performance, the boxes would get tattier, (they seemed to diminish in number) the costumes crinklier, the red grape juice that stood in for red wine all the more fermented. After every performance what we left behind was a cardboard sign, emblazoned with the slogan ‘HANDS OFF’ in red paint.

After a particularly charged talk-back at a high school in Belhar, we got word the next day that some feisty young learners – girls, young women – bandied together to form a debate society. The need to discuss important things, share ideas had become urgent so as to propel them to action. I felt an overwhelming sense of pride, knowing that we had facilitated, or at the very least precipitated that for them. The fact that they were young women made my heart want to burst.

HANDS ON

[That very morning, on the way to the school, we had driven past what was clearly a crime scene – a man (I assume) under that white sheet, his feet crossed at the ankles – a detail I still cannot shake.]

Then the next school, a private girl’s school in the leafy green southern suburbs. Privilege. At once familiar – I had come from a similar school – and woefully unfamiliar – bunnies hopped us down a cobbled avenue to the drama school where we would ultimately perform. Bunnies. Hopped. As I stared at the legs, crossed at the ankle, I couldn’t help but notice how many dark legs were still seemingly trapped behind stockings so many shades lighter. I stifled a chuckle and thought – seriously?! they’re still not making stockings for us? Surely not! Words like barely beige, and grecian blonde echoed through my mind and it took some work to regain focus. But focus we did. And the show went on and the talk back was so much more dynamic than I thought it would be. Somewhere at some point in the talk-back, which to then had gone predictably, a young woman, in the back, who looked like a young me, hair out and curly, challenged her peers to carefully consider what it means to frequent the Biscuit Mill – gentrification central. The question electrified the room, and the timbre of the comments changed. Again the cry- but what do we do, how do we stop this happening, how can we create diverse thriving communities? When we pointed out that in fact the school grounds and surrounds now occupy what used to be one such community, murmurs filled the room. Finally, when a young shy student asked how to attend to voices that feel silenced by the dominant voices, saying the same thing – it occurred to me that theatre, particularly this kind of applied theatre would be ideal. I came up with the idea that the learners create monologues, or even dialogues, that they be anonymous, and then randomly blind choose from all the written pieces, and perform them. This would be a way to introduce new voices, new discussions, new approaches to discussions and re-energise debates that were happening. We left with promises to return, run workshops. Again, the bunnies saw us out.

Then Cissie Gool House happened. The occupied hospital, crammed with people in various stages of un-housed. Displaced, removed, moved, evicted, homeless. Tethered together by the shared experience of what it means to be on the wrong side of where politic and property collide in this city. House rules, updates, testimonies, singing, rallying battle cries, and toddlers cries rang out into the night, and we settled into performing our piece, as ever in the round. A camping torch somehow strung up to add to the florescent light that shone above us. The crowd was with us. It was visceral. They hated the Property Developer, and many seemed incapable of separating actor from character – testament to Mark’s acting – booing, jeering, responding throughout. They were vocal during the couple’s fight, pendulous, as the crowd agreed with Lorrie, then applauded Kay when the argument went her way. By the time Auntie Sumaya made her journey from fatigued resignation to reignited vigour, the crowd were all but on their feet. Her final call to arms drowned out by everything from cheering, to howling. I felt buoyed. I cried. During the talk-back a woman said she felt reminded that her place was there, in this struggle. To keep fighting, in spite of her battle weary spirit. We had not forgotten them. And they were charged. That night it took Neil almost an hour to leave – so many people wanted to talk, to share. I had to drag him away. It was powerful what had happened. On our way out, two women lamented having to run the gauntlet of waiting on Woodstock main road at that time of night. They were going to where they lived. It would take them 2 taxis. It was not lost on any of us.

At UCT performing to educators was peculiar. Criticism and critique. Much talk of autonomy of text. Theatre as a pedagogical tool. But who would own the work? I raised the idea that theatre is in fact the opposite of that. It is not autonomy, but community. Its very collaborative nature necessarily means that every delivery, every performance is a conspiracy between performer and audience. It is never the same. It is mercurial. I suggested that perhaps it is why it can be an incredibly powerful pedagogical tool. Its capacity for empathy lends itself to engaging with information in a dynamic way. I believe people hear and understand things differently, more intensely. But that could just be because I am an actor...

And for all the questions and comments and concerns of – what is the point, what do I believe, why do we not provide answers – my answer is the same: I am a pebble. My job is to get to the bottom of the water. A consequence of that drop, is ripples, seismic waves that radiate out, increasing in intensity and strength. At best it will gather momentum and become a wave, ushering change. At minimum, the same pebble dropped enough times will cause a steady stream and smooth stones. I can’t control the waves, the ripples, the tides. All I can do is get things going. Get to the bottom of the thing. Kick up mud and silt and things that have settled. The dirt.

Much like the Jenga – the central theatrical image/idea (which garnered as many responses and ideas as there were people who commented on it) we spent weeks pulling apart a structure of a thing. Then it toppled. Then we gathered. Then we start again.

Quanita Adams 2019

Finding our common thread written by Florence Lozet and Kira Erwin

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 20:52:41 GMT

Storytelling as public advocacy for migration and inclusion in the city

The Migration and the Inclusive City project in Durban

Through its Catalytic Fund and emerging Joint Work Programme on Cities and Migration, Cities Alliance seeks to involve all partners with an urban focus to advance thinking on cities and migration. As an example, Cities Alliance financed the Migration and the Inclusive City project to help Durban, South Africa develop a new response to migration that emphasises social inclusion, integration and participation through a public awareness and advocacy campaign.

Durban has experienced growing animosity against people identified as coming from other African countries. Despite a progressive South African constitution, xenophobic sentiments are common in popular and political rhetoric. In 2009, violent attacks against "foreigners" spread throughout the country, and again in the city of Durban in 2015. Developing inclusive policy frameworks requires tackling the discrimination that underpins this violence.

In the Durban project, this was done through a method of empathetic storytelling. But whose stories should be heard? Non-governmental organisations, faith-based organisations, and new migrant-led civil society groups have increasingly entered into city forums about exclusion in the city. While important, these voices are almost always male. So, this project focused on the voices least heard in the city: those of migrant women.

Oral histories were collected from 30 migrant women with different backgrounds: women seeking asylum, women with different visas, and South African internal migrant women from rural areas. These oral histories are deeply moving accounts of arriving in the city and making it a place like home. The stories were then woven into a piece of intimate documentary theatre called The Last Country, which tells the stories of Ofrah from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Anene from Zimbabwe, Amina from Somalia, and Ma Thwala from South Africa. It is performed with audience members sitting in a circle around the four women actors.

The play was performed in traditional theatre venues and in community halls across the city free of charge, eventually reaching some 750 people. It drew emotional responses from the audience, especially how Ma Thwala's story was woven into the stories of women from outside South Africa. This created a shared narrative that highlighted commonalities rather than differences.

Connecting to others through listening to their stories is a profoundly empathetic experience for most humans. In the South African context, oral storytelling has deep cultural and historical meaning: it is the way both history and a sense of identity have been passed down from generation to generation. Storytelling can be a consciousness-raising strategy to challenge attitudes, and it can be a useful method for engaging local government.

"It was a real wake up call for me, something which I had not had before. And I guess when you see it in two dimensions, when you read a text book or a case study, you kind of get cynical and you almost get comfortable where you think that the researcher had a bias," said a senior official who attended a dedicated performance for city officials.

"But when you see it in front of you, and you see that the research is talking to you, and you see that it is pounding at your door, it is a whole new concept of learning, and it's a whole new concept of awakening," the official noted.

The long-term impact of work that attempts to shift attitudes is difficult to measure. Nonetheless, storytelling methods can make a contribution. At the heart of identity-based violence is the dismissal of another person's humanity, the silencing of their voice. Creating ways in which these stories are publicly heard can powerfully mitigate against this silencing. As a local newspaper reported on The Last Country: "It is only when we realise the enormity of the threads which bind us, can we begin to empathise, share and heal together."

With cities around the world grappling with issues of migration and inclusion, there is no time like the present to share each other's stories so that we may find the common threads that bind us.

Related resources:

Link to Cities Alliance Catalytic Fund page: http://www.citiesalliance.org/catalytic-fund

Link to the project website: http://durbanmigration.org.za

Theatre's war against whoonga by Lloyd Gedye

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 20:52:14 GMT

Can theatre change lives?
Lloyd Gedye spends time with the creators of an extraordinary new play, Ulwembu, born of the life stories of whoonga (nyaope) users in KwaZulu-Natal communities. He comes away believing in the power of the stage

‘They died in front of my eyes,” says Phumlani Ngubane as we sit in the foyer of the Durban Playhouse’s Loft Theatre. “They were shot. They stole from a bad person who hunted them down. They were murdered right in front of my eyes ... My heart is pained, even now.” His colleague Zenzo Msomi nods solemnly as Ngubane speaks and then adds: “We were like family with them. They stole from the wrong house.” Actors Ngubane and Msomi are part of a KwaMashu theatre collective called The Big Brotherhood, and on the day we sat down to chat in mid-April, they were in the middle of a run of their play Ulwembu (Spider) at the Loft Theatre.

The play’s focus is the scourge of whoonga – or wunga, or nyaope, as it is known in other parts of the country. The play is based on more than two years of deep research and the couple who were murdered were Ngubane’s landlady and her boyfriend, both whoonga users. “Some people in my community turned against me, as I was associated with the users,” says Ngubane. “They felt like I was defending them.” Ulwembu is a gritty urban nightmare, a place where characters mostly on the margins of society eke out lives, rather than live them. It is a story about addiction, featuring drug users, runners and dealers, desperate mothers, absent fathers, helpless and vindictive police, overworked social workers, enraged communities, fearless xenophobes and foreign nationals living in fear. It effortlessly illustrates how everyone in a community is drawn into the web of whoonga. Large ropes pulled by the whole cast to contort around the users as they go into withdrawal represent this web.

...

At R25 a hit, whoonga is one of the cheapest drugs around and, for dealers, it’s a big-money industry. The Big Brotherhood’s research suggests that a user can spend up to R150 a day. So a single user can be worth R700 a week to a dealer – R33 600 a year. “There is huge demand and prices are going up,” says Big Brotherhood member Vumani Khumalo. Msomi says 90% of the users they interviewed said they wanted out. “The more we spoke to the users, the more we could see that they were just people who were trapped.” Users and former users who have seen the play maintain that it is incredibly realistic in painting a picture of addiction. But Ulwembu is doing more than that.

It is asking us to face up to the realities that this is a community problem, and that it is going to require smart minds and a group effort to fix. “Who do you blame?” asks actress Mpume Mthombeni, who plays a user’s mother in Ulwembu. “It’s so easy to wash your hands, but what do we do with all this blame? This problem is all of ours.”

...

The story of Ulwembu goes back a few years, to May 2014 when award-winning Durban playwright Neil Coppen was heading a workshop with community-theatre participants from KwaZulu-Natal. He asked them to write lists of social issues that they felt young writers should be confronting in their work. The number one issue on everyone’s list was whoonga. “I had seen the whoonga problem mushrooming and taking over the city,” says Coppen. “I saw the way the media was reporting it, as a zombie apocalypse – people in rags around drums of fire – the nightmare of the suburbs ... We were dehumanising the users by creating these monster myths,” he told me.

During the workshop, then 22-year-old Phumzile Ndlovu shared a story about her cousin Jabulo, who had come to stay with them in Umlazi’s D Section. He soon became hooked on whoonga and was dealing the drug too. Her family, under threat from the community, had to throw him out and he relocated to Albert Park. He was addicted to whoonga for five years before he passed away at the age of 25. Driven by fears that his spirit would come back to harm the family, his corpse was beaten with sticks and then taken back to Albert Park, where whoonga was sprinkled on his lips and into his grave. The act was performed so that he could find peace. Coppen says it was this story that first lit the spark of what would become Ulwembu. After the workshop, he began to research the whoonga problem. “I spoke to everyone, from the hysterical white woman running the activist group to the business owner who was being broken into at night,” he says. “When I did interview the officials at the top, it was horrifying how little research they had done.” Realising that he was going to have to dig deeper, Coppen started looking for collaborators. “As a white male, I didn’t have access to the real story,” he says. “I could speak to social workers, but they all said the same sh*t, had the same statistics and inane files that actually said nothing ... They weren’t listening to the people going through it.”

...

The number one issue on everyone’s list was whoonga. “I had seen the whoonga problem mushrooming and taking over the city,” says Coppen. “I saw the way the media was reporting it, as a zombie apocalypse – people in rags around drums of fire – the nightmare of the suburbs ... We were dehumanising the users by creating these monster myths,” he told me. During the workshop, then 22-year-old Phumzile Ndlovu shared a story about her cousin Jabulo, who had come to stay with them in Umlazi’s D Section. He soon became hooked on whoonga and was dealing the drug too. Her family, under threat from the community, had to throw him out and he relocated to Albert Park. He was addicted to whoonga for five years before he passed away at the age of 25. Driven by fears that his spirit would come back to harm the family, his corpse was beaten with sticks and then taken back to Albert Park, where whoonga was sprinkled on his lips and into his grave. The act was performed so that he could find peace.

Coppen says it was this story that first lit the spark of what would become Ulwembu. After the workshop, he began to research the whoonga problem.

“I spoke to everyone, from the hysterical white woman running the activist group to the business owner who was being broken into at night,” he says. “When I did interview the officials at the top, it was horrifying how little research they had done.” Realising that he was going to have to dig deeper, Coppen started looking for collaborators.

“As a white male, I didn’t have access to the real story,” he says. “I could speak to social workers, but they all said the same sh*t, had the same statistics and inane files that actually said nothing ... They weren’t listening to the people going through it.”

...

So Coppen invited The Big Brotherhood, a community-theatre group he had worked with before, as well as actress Mthombeni, to collaborate with him. At this time, sociologist Dylan McGarry entered Coppen’s life. McGarry had recently completed a sociology PhD with a focus on empathy and he was interested in using theatre in the sociology and education fields. He conducted workshops with the actors, where they were trained in ethical research. “The idea of listening,” says McGarry, and pauses ... “listening is one of the most emancipatory things you can give. Listening is a gift. You are gifting someone your attention. But you also become a different type of listener – an active, empathetic listener. It’s all about them, not about you. Most people we worked with were so vulnerable. It had never been about them. That’s probably why they are users in the first place.” After training, the actors decamped to their own neighbourhoods in Umlazi and KwaMashu, and returned two months later with notebooks laden with detailed research. “Dylan calls them intuitive sociologists,” says Coppen. “Nobody could have got that level of access.” “Before, I thought all whoonga addicts were just criminals – people who would mug you and steal your phone,” says Mthombeni. “So imagine, now I had to approach these people and talk to them ... You need to think about how you approach the users in a respectful manner.” She says that, in a way, you are asking the user to undress in front of you in telling their story. “And then you realise these people have never been heard and are crying out for attention,” she says. “They are so relieved that they can pour out their problems to you.” Msomi says that the users respected that the actors came to them in a “neutral way”. “They want to stop smoking whoonga. They say they don’t know how,” he says. “They say the pain from the withdrawal, known as ‘arosta’, is so terrible they have to keep smoking.” It is most commonly the physically addictive opiate heroin, which is part of the whoonga “recipe”, that makes it so hard to kick. “These people have a problem that needs to be supported, not punished,” says Msomi. Ngcobo Cele from The Big Brotherhood says that the more whoonga users are judged, the more they feel as though they’re on the outside of society. “One guy I met was being bullied at school and then an older boy stood up for him. The older boy was smoking whoonga, so the younger boy started to impress the older boy. He was thinking: if I have this guy on my side, I won’t be bullied at school. A lot of it is all wrapped up in trying to be a hard man in the township, someone who commands respect.” The Playhouse run of Ulwembu last month also functioned as part of the research. “It takes in everything as it goes along and changes,” says Coppen.

...

After every performance, the audience is encouraged to remain behind in a facilitated discussion. It is loaded with users, people from rehabilitation centres, police, social workers, the homeless, sex workers, family members and former addicts. The conversations are lively and poignant, and loaded with testimony and sharing.

“They have a common reference point in the play,” says Coppen. “They are talking about the characters, not about each other. It takes away the personal. It’s about a deeper listening.” He tells of a previous performance where a senior police leader protested about a scene where the police make the users eat their drugs when they are caught. A whole group of users in the audience stood up and testified, one after the other, about how it had happened to them. After one performance, a 10-year-old street child speaks about how she is glad the mother character in the play did not give p on her son. The part that is implied, but remains unsaid about her own story, is heartbreaking for many. Another school teacher testifies how 12 kids in his class are using whoonga, and five are running the drug. To the cast, he says: “We need you desperately.”

Sam Pillay, head of the Chatsworth Anti-Drug Forum, says the play represents what he sees on the streets every day. He began fighting the rise of the designer drug “sugars” in his neighbourhood in 2005 and has been warning city officials about the extent of the problem for years. Professor Monique Marx from the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology says they are trying to show government that it is cost-effective to roll out opiate-replacement therapy, such as methadone. She believes this should be coupled with the decriminalisation of the drug, a far better option than pushing whoonga underground. “Support, don’t punish,” she says, summing up her approach. Dr Lochan Naidoo, a Durban-based addiction consultant in the audience, says that by the time public health facilities implement methadone treatment for users, it will be too late, as happened with the roll-out of antiretrovirals. A middle-aged woman a few weeks out of jail after a nine-year drug conviction warmly thanks the cast and tells Cele, who plays Andile, a whoonga runner and user in the play, that she saw herself in him. “I was in tears here,” she says. “I was in that story.”

“Everyone has witnessed something together,” says McGarry. “And you have created a safe space for sharing.” In its essence, theirs is a continuation of South Africa’s vibrant protest-theatre tradition. The difficulty of black life is unpacked on stage to prompt social change.

...

At one point over the four days I spend with the cast of Ulwembu, I am sitting in The Playhouse foyer waiting for McGarry, who ran across the road to get some bean curries for lunch. He returned with the story of how a young guy from the street followed him into the takeaway joint and wanted to know more about the “whoonga play” that was on. McGarry told the young man he was involved and could get him a ticket. As we sit eating our curries in the foyer, the young man approaches to confirm his seat and thank McGarry. It’s clear that whoonga is all around us. We are all caught up in its web.

Natural Heritage IS Cultural Heritage written by Taryn Pereira

empatheatreinfo@gmail.com (Dylan McGarry) — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 20:51:54 GMT

As South Africans stockpile boerewors in preparation for our annual Heritage Day celebrations on 24t September, it is worth remembering that our natural heritage and cultural heritage are two sides of the same coin.

A group of concerned activists and researchers are working on a strategy to appeal the Department of Mineral Resource’s (DMR’s) green light to Sasol and Eni (an Italian oil and gas company) to carry out exploratory drilling of the seabed off KZN – an authorisation that may have grave implications for our shared marine heritage; not to mention the perpetuation of climate crimes by some of the world’s worst carbon polluters.

Based on an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) DMR came to the conclusion that ‘The majority of the potential impacts associated with the planned drilling programme on the marine environment were assessed and rated to have negligible to low significance post-mitigation…and will not result to any detrimental risk to the environment and public. The authorisation is accordingly granted’.

This was met with anger and dismay by the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance and many other civil society groups, scientists and concerned citizens who were waiting for responses from the consultants and from the Petroleum Agency of South Africa to the numerous concerns they had raised.

The failures of EIAs are widely acknowledged. They are expected to carry out a public participation processes, but transferring the approaches of EIAs into the marine environment dilutes their effectiveness.

There is so much uncertainty about the impacts of even exploratory drilling on ocean environments. This should concern us deeply: we know that ocean health is already deeply compromised by human impact – plastic pollution, acidification due to climate change and overfishing.

But beyond the massive gaps in our scientific understanding of marine environments, and beyond the intrinsic right of ocean life to exist and thrive without disturbance from man and machine, there are aspects of human relationship with the ocean that are completely overlooked in this decision-making process.

There is one line in the environmental authorisation that refers to marine heritage: ‘In the event that the survey(s) conducted… identify the presence of archaeological sites or shipwrecks, the holder must notify the South African Heritage Resources Agency and the Petroleum Agency SA of the discovery’. This is the sum total consideration of the risk to heritage that seabed mining might have.

Considering the socio-cultural impacts of deep seabed mining must be a relief to political decision makers and mining companies who have had to answer to such crimes as desecrating burial grounds, bulldozing villages, relocating communities, turning drinking water to poison, and so on, through land-based mining. The seabed is the new ‘terra nullis’, holding riches and wealth untold with no one to claim it as their home.

It is this limited perspective that a group of researcher-activist-theatre makers-academics wanted to challenge. Using a methodology they call ‘Empatheatre’ Neil Coppen; Mpume Mthombeni; Dr. Dylan McGarry; Dr. Kira Erwin and others, set out to listen to the many stories of the sea.

Over the past few months, they have been speaking to scientists, fisherfolk, marine educators, traditional healers, zionist religious leaders, lifeguards, activists, surfers, and others about their relationship with the sea.

The KZN ocean and seabed holds profound and complex cultural and spiritual meaning for many people. Within isiZulu and isiXhosa spirituality, some ancestors dwell beneath the sea floor. This realm is where the souls of many departed family members reside and rest, as well as where traditional healers journey to learn from the ancestors during ‘twasa’, the process of initiation. The seafloor is a symbolic and spiritual space that holds knowledge and the afterlife. Mining the sea floor is therefore comparable to mining heaven.

Furthermore there are Shembe, Zionist, Hindu and other religious rituals centred around the sea as a site of spiritual cleansing and baptism. Even biological scientists affirm the cultural, spiritual and mystical significance of the ocean. Marine scientists at the South African National Biodiversity Institute include “muti and magic” as a category of interest in their deep-sea explorations.

Coppen also immersed himself in the archival research conducted by Neelan Govender and Viroshen Chetty which documents the long histories of South Indian Durban fisher folk and the ways in which their cultural, spiritual and livelihood practices are intimately connected to the wellbeing of the ocean.

These stories have been woven into an Empatheatre production called Lalela Ulwandle (Listen to the Sea). Empatheatre, as Coppen explains: “...is a theatre-based methodology that intentionally aims to inspire and develop a greater empathy and kindness in complex social learning spaces that are experiencing conflict or injustice.”

The Empatheatre team have been responsible for launching several high-profile social-justice theatre projects over the last decade including Soil & Ash (focusing on rural communities facing pressure from coal-mining companies), Ulwembu (street-level drug addiction), The Last Country (stories of migrant women) and now Lalela Ulwandle (stories of the sea).

The processes of deep listening to diverse stories, respect for socio-cultural relationships with place, and thoughtful dialogue, that have gone into this theatre production, stand in stark contrast to the extremely superficial consultation processes that we have to settle for in our so-called participatory democracy.

The authorisation for exploratory drilling off the KZN coast is one of many such decisions, hastening the expansion of extractive activities into our marine environment, when we still know so little about the long-term impacts; while our governance processes are still so deeply skewed in favour of powerful business interests; and when the stories and concerns of so many of our citizens go unheard. Once the damage to our ocean has been done, there is no going back.

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