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Storytelling as a political act
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 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.
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 .
How do we make sense of the violent histories that mark our past? This play, Isidlamlilo, forces us to engage seriously with this question. Depending on your own relationship with our violent history, this play awakens a profound and at times unsettling realization that history is a living breathing force in all our lives. Isidlamlilo is set in the dying days of Apartheid, and in the present democratic South Africa.