Buyela, a new production by Empatheatre in partnership with groundwork...

On the final afternoon of one of Durban's last working landfills, two women meet amid mountains of discarded things. Mam Nothemba, a waste expert, matriarch, and daughter of the dump. She has spent forty years transforming other people's rubbish into a livelihood, a brick house, and eight grandchildren. Nokwanda, a journalist in her thirties, arrives claiming to want her story, though she carries a quieter desperation she's slow to admit. What unfolds between them is part detective game,

Part oral history, part fairy tale: the two women read the lives of strangers from

their rubbish, trace glass back to mountains and plastic back to ancient seas,

and weave mythological and very real stories together, all threaded through

their conversation is the looming arrival of an incinerator and the knowledge

that the gates to the landfill will close at five, for good. Buyela, the Zulu

word for return is a play about what we throw away and what refuses to

disappear: grief, knowledge, solidarity, and the circular logic of a living

earth.

Informed through over four years of collaborative research, story-listening and citizen-led enquiry with informal waste collectors this play aims to create a third space to explore how we might choose to live closer to the earth and with each other.

Starring

Mpume Mthombeni & Minenhle Sikhosana

Created by

Neil Coppen

Roshina Ratnam

Dylan McGarry

Mpume Mthombeni

Tony Miyambo

FRI, 25 JUNE, 18H30 SQUARE SPACE THEATRE (UKZN)

SAT, 26 JUNE, 18H30 SQUARE SPACE THEATRE (UKZN)

FREE ENTRANCE,

LIMITED SEATS RSVP: sonyatedeschiegmail.com