Funny how we change colour!
THEY say laughter is the best medicine and for funny man Sne Dladla, it’s what he likes to do to best, so that audiences can laugh at themselves and at him, unfolding their emotional sides. Call it a different and cathartic way of exorcising those demons from running your life.
Sne or Seneliso is a busy man these days and has just started rehearsals for his role as Pop, the narrator, in the musical King Kong opening next month at the Fugard. He is also in full swing rehearsing for iChameleon which opens at The Baxter on June 27.
He asked Loukmaan Adams to direct and, as the three of us meet up in the Fugard foyer, it’s almost a laugh a minute as the pair spur each other on, showing they are in perfect sync, on and off stage.
At the tender age of 26 years, Sne’s notched up two Fleur du Cap awards and a National Arts Festival Ovation Award, and he whispers, with a smile on that open and charming face, many years ago he was placed joint third in the Grade 3 three-legged race.
Speaking about his latest onehander he says: “iChameleon is essentially how we are chameleons and change to fit every situation.”
“We need to be more authentic with ourselves – it’s really so absurd how we change our colours to suit other people. The human condition is so strange and really one can only view it as a funny situation and make a joke of it.”
Born in KwaZulu-Natal, Sne says he took his parents by surprise when he said he wanted to study the arts. “For a young Zulu man like myself, it was expected I’d do something more suited ‘to earning a living’. But that said, my parents have been very supportive.”
He studied drama and music at Rhodes University and has been in theatre since 2013. His first one man show was at the Grahamstown arts fest in 2014 in The Joke’s on You (for which he won the Ovation Award).
He has performed for, and with, Andrew Buckland, been cast and directed by Athol Fugard in The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek and in David Kramer’s Orpheus in Africa. He’s also been on Comedy Central News and he and Loukmaan met in District Six Kanala last year.
Says Sne, “I wanted Loukmaan for my new show – he understands my comedic bone and we have covered many characters together.”
Loukmaan says: “We did three seasons of Kanala together and Sne was also the front man for Nic Rabinowitz but it took me a while to place him. We work well together and here it’s a matter of submerging theatre and stand-up comedy. And music fits in as well.”
It’s clear Loukmaan sees the young man as going places: “I look at Sne and where he is and where he wants to go. In rehearsals we speak a lot and often when we speak we drift away from the topic. We’re friends and colleagues and I fear he may be snapped up, go overseas and then I’d get emotional.”
Back to the show, Sne says what he also loves about it is he gets to make music on stage spontaneously, and, with the musical equipment he’ll have, he can switch from one genre to the next: from rap, remix, hip hop, house andmore traditional African music.
“This play is going to be lots of fun and it’s also going to be silly in a nice way with lots of things going on.”
Sne says he’s always wanted to be a funny man: “There’s something so beautiful about making an audience laugh.
“It can really get such a weight off their shoulders.”
His parents have only seen him perform in stand-up twice and he says they’ve also seen him bomb.
“They’d flown here from KZN and came to see me in one of my shows and it was really embarrassing. I froze and there was this absolute silence for eight minutes. They saw me die up there on the stage. But they shrugged their shoulders and have also watched me on TV in Comedy Central News.”
For iChameleon he makes it clear it’s all about being funny. “This is a very important thing to say – this is not about current events. It’s definitely not that. And it’s not stand-up either.
“It’s more personal and interactive. I think people will really identify with it. It’s a story of self-discovery and a fusion of many things. It’s thought-provoking. It’s moving and it’s amusing.”