Moyo makes international playwright mark
DESPITE receiving overwhelming support within the local circles, playwrights from the city can all attest to be haunted by the same spirit of failing to make a visible or lasting mark across the borders.
The curse has been so visible that most playwrights, especially women shelve their works as soon as they showcase them on different platforms in the city, mainly due to lack of exposure and even financial muscle to probe their works any further.
Nevertheless there are few outstanding playwrights who seem to be managing to exorcise that spirit as they are getting international recognition where many would have read a doubting Thomas script.
Such is the case of one local playwright Thembelihle Moyo, who is a full time writer with a career that spans over 10 years and it’s finally starting to pay off as her play Who said I don’t want to dance has been selected for Women Playwright International Conference to be held in Chile’s St Diego mid next year.
“This is overwhelming. I am very excited to be part of this and to receive recognition of this multitude, it shows that we are doing things appropriately and we headed in the right direction,” said Moyo.
Moyo, who boasts of more than 15 plays to her name, managed to shrug off stiff competition from all over the world to make it to the competition.
“They selected 36 countries from all over the world. From Africa they selected 4 writers from South Africa 1 from Nigeria, 1 from Namibia and myself from Zimbabwe. In general writers from more than 300 countries submitted their plays, but I managed to be part of the selected crew,” she said.
Director of Women Playwright International Chile, Sally Campusano Torres, said it was a challenging task to select the final plays as there were a lot of applicants.
“This has not been any easy task. The quantity and quality of the received proposals were a huge challenge for the more 30 juries that participated in the different selection committees.
“The chosen proposals responded to multiple criteria including, quality, pertinence with the themes of the conference, relation with the social and cultural Chilean context, opening to new languages and finally, the technical factibility according to the spaces available for the conference, among others,” said Torres.